(I swear I'll do and post about other things at some point, but!)
In the early 1900s there was that chicken craze. Breeding fancy chickens was an acceptable pastime and a fad. I'm unsure of when using brooders instead of actual chickens to hatch your eggs became a thing, but I'd assume it happened between 1897 and 1902, since this catalogue has a whole array of brooders for all your egg hatching needs.
Did the tech become available because of the fad, or the tech becoming available make the fad take off? I don't know, but it's interesting.