Frank J. Zamboni
You’ve probably heard about the zamboni - or at least seen one smoothing out an ice rink. The inventor behind this machine is Frank Zamboni, born in 1901 in Eureka, Utah.
In the 1920s, Frank and his brother Lawerence had a business that made refrigeration for dairies and ice blocks for transporting food.
In 1940, they opened an ice rink. Night after night workers had to scrape the ice and spray water on it to make it smooth again - a painstaking effort. Frank Zamboni worked on building a machine to tackle this problem, and after nine years of work, the first Zamboni ice machine was born. Ice skaters and stadiums found out about the machine and purchased them to keep their ice smooth.
Photograph By: Unknown author or not provided - U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain
