“... people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire, and a Zamboni clearing the ice."
Charlie Brown, Peanuts character
The Zamboni name is synonymous with ice rink resurfacing in the United States, although few people outside of ice-skating would recognize it.
Frank Zamboni (1901-1988) was born just after the turn of the twentieth century to Italian immigrant parents. As a young man he worked on the family farm and as a mechanic in a local garage. Frank opened an ice-making plant, with his younger brother Lawrence, producing blocks of ice for refrigeration. When electrical refrigerators were invented in the mid 1930s, making the production of ice blocks redundant, the Zambonis transformed their ice-making equipment and expertise into an ice rink. "Iceland" proved a popular local attraction, with 150,000 visitors a year.
Cleaning, or resurfacing, of the rink was a time-consuming business, requiring three men and taking an hour and a half to complete. Zamboni started to think about ways in which this process could be made more efficient, and in 1948 he succeeded in producing a working ice rink resurfacer. The "Model A" was born and instantly transformed the high-pressure world of ice rink resurfacing, a Job that now could be performed by one man in ten minutes.
The genius of Frank's machine is that it performs all the multiple tasks needed to resurface a rink simultaneously. Blades shave off a thin layer of the surface ice and a series of conveyors transport the waste to the back of the vehicle where the waste ice (or "snow") is stored in a bucket. Water is blasted over the surface of the ice at high pressure to remove dirt and refill holes in the ice. Excess water is then removed with the help of a giant squeegee.
