The Evolution of the Zamboni

The best way to understand the future is usually rooted in the past. Our friends at Yester are dedicated to providing historical context to current events and exploring the strange nooks and crannies of yesteryear. Each week, they're going to offer up a deep dive into history that will help you understand the big crazy present.

If you're an ice hockey or figure skating fan, you're familiar with the Zamboni, the enormous contraption that sweeps across the rink during intermission to leave the ice clean and smooth for the next half. Ice cleaning machines will be hard at work at the Socchi Olympic Games opening on Friday. But how was ice resurfaced before these powerful modern-day machines?

First of all, you probably refer to all ice cleaners as Zambonis, but this isn't always accurate. Zamboni is a company name, like Kleenex, and though the Zamboni family was the first to market, another company also produces ice resurfacing machines, the Resurfice Corporation.

Both companies sprung up because people started worrying about the quality of ice. It was in 1763, when the first speed skating race was held in England on the Fens, a swampy land in the eastern part of the country. The intrepid souls out on the ice quickly learned the smoothest path would deter falls.

Of course, one option was to scrub the ice by hand—if you're familiar with the fantastic sport of curling you know that to speed up the stone, sweepers buffer that ice to let the stone glide along. But this is a rather time consuming process, especially on a large surface, like one the size of an ice rink. So some interesting contraptions were developed.

An early-stage "Zamboni" device was created by Al Purpur, one of the first promoters of ice hockey in Grand Forks in the 1930s. He worked for the University of North Dakota for decades and tended to a colossal rink called The Barn. When faced with the need to clean the ice at hockey games, he decided to create a device that, according to SiouxSports, “consisted of two barrels, one welded on top of the other, pipes, and valves that directed hot water to the ice through a canvas strip at the bottom rear of the Rube Goldberg contraption (‘My barrel flooding outfit,’ Purpur called it).”

Though this was certainly an upgrade from the manual scrubbing ice, Purpur had to pull the fairly large, hot metal object across the rink. A pushable device would have been an improvement. And it was.

In the early 1940s, Olympic medalist speed skater Leo Friesinger was quoted as saying, “It is a pleasure for me to return to Minneapolis and skate on the best ice in the United States.” Why would Minneapolis have such nice ice? It was because of two men, Elmer Anderson and Gotfred Lundgren, who worked for the park board and used a three part system: a mechanized sweeper, a tractor drawn ice planer, and a bucket of hot water.

But while all of this was an upgrade, it still wasn't cutting it. Enter Frank Zamboni. He owned a refrigeration company—cutting-edge technology at the time—and he used to make ice to keep dairy products fresh. With the advent of modern refrigeration techniques, Zamboni opted to take his ice expertise to other frozen venues.

He created an ice rink in 1939 in Paramount, California but soon became frustrated by the available methods to the clean the rink. So he used his mechanical skills to develop a few different models of ice resurfacers, including one that was powered by a Jeep. After a few revisions, in 1949, the Zamboni was born. More than 10,000 motorized Zambonis have been made since.

Frank Zamboni died in 1988, and has since been inducted into the US Hockey Hall of Fame, the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame, and the US Speed Skating Hall of Fame, among other honors. Resurfice Corporation, for its part, came out with a similar and sleeker model than the one the company built in 1967. In fact it's Resurface machines—not Zambonis—that have cleaned the ice for many Winter Olypmic Games.