American inventor Frank J. Zamboni (1901‐1988) built the first mechanized ice resurfacer for skating rinks and hockey arenas. An inveterate tinkerer, the California ice rink owner assembled the first of the lumbering vehicles that bear his name out of surplus Jeep parts just after World War II. “I was just trying to solve a problem,” Zamboni told the Toronto Globe & Mail. “Had to hire too many men and it took too … long to clean the rink.”

The son of Italian immigrants, Frank Joseph Zamboni was born on January 16, 1901, in Eureka, Utah. At the time, Eureka was experiencing a boom due to its proximity to gold and silver deposits in the Tintic Mountains. His parents, Francesco and Carmelina, soon decided to become farmers and left Utah for Idaho, where they bought property in the resort town of Lava Hot Springs near Pocatello. Zamboni and his brothers worked on the farm, but at age 15 he left school to take a job with a local mechanic.

In 1920, the Zamboni family quit the farm and moved to Clearwater, California, a community situated just east of the Los Angeles River and south of what is now the busy Century Freeway, or I-105. The eldest Zamboni son, George, already had an auto-repair business in Clearwater, which was next to another unincorporated township, Hynes. In a previous era, this area was part of the original land-grant parcels given by the Spanish crown to soldiers. The Spanish landowner who held this area south of present-day Los Angeles in the early 19th century turned it into a vast cattle ranch. By the early 20th century the acreage had been sold off and had become the center of the dairy industry in Southern California.

To improve his career prospects, Zamboni enrolled at the Coyne Electrical School in Chicago in the early 1920s. When he returned to Hynes, he and his brother Lawrence established an electrical supply business that sold and installed refrigeration and cooling units at local dairies. Zamboni became by necessity an expert tinkerer, receiving his first patent in 1928. By this point he and Lawrence had also built an ice-making plant, which furnished enormous blocks that helped keep California produce fresh on long journeys by rail in the era before refrigerated freight cars. The advent of reliable air-conditioning and refrigeration units in the mid-1930s cut deeply into the ice-making business. The brothers instead teamed up with their cousin Peter Zamboni to build an ice rink in Hynes. It opened in January of 1940 as the Iceland Skating Rink at 8041 Jackson Street.

Artificial ice rinks were a relatively new phenomenon, with the first ones opening in New York City in the 1890s. The ice was made using a system of pipes that flooded the surface with a mixture of water and chemicals. Elite schools in New England like Harvard and Princeton built their own rinks for their college hockey teams. In the late 1920s, Southern California’s first ice rink, the Polar Palace, opened on Van Ness Avenue near Melrose in Los Angeles, near the famous entrance to the Paramount Studios. It was, however, enormously expensive to construct a year-round rink: just three months before the Zamboni family’s Iceland opened, the New York Times ran articles about a plan to build a year-round rink in Central Park at a cost of $250,000 ($5.4 million in 2023 dollars), although this proposed scheme also included a bandstand and bleachers.

A few months after Iceland opened, the Zambonis built a dome over it to prevent melting. Another issue was the ripples caused by the underfloor piping used in artificial ice rinks, and in 1946 Zamboni was granted another United States patent (No. 2,411,919) to remedy this hazard. The costliest expense in maintaining an ice rink, however, was the necessity of restoring a smooth surface after skaters’ blades had been running over it. Every night, a crew of five would work to resurface the Iceland rink. This involved scraping up all the shavings, adding a fresh coat of water, and smoothing the surface with squeegees. The entire process took 90 minutes, and Zamboni decided to find a cheaper, faster way to do this.

Zamboni first began tinkering with a mechanized way to resurface his ice rink in the early 1940s with a Ford tractor. By the end of the decade, he had perfected all the moving parts that make up the modern Zamboni ice resurfacer, and he applied for a patent in 1949. It was granted by the U.S. Patent Office on June 23, 1953, as U.S. Patent No. 2,642,679, for his “Ice Rink Resurfacing Machine.” “A sharp-edged blade shaves the surface of the ice,” explained Joseph Scafetta Jr. in a 2001 article that was reprinted on the Zamboni Company site. The shavings are gathered, and a conveyor (now a vertical screw) propels them into a snow tank. Water is then applied to the ice from a second tank, and dirt and debris are removed. “Next, the dirty water is vacuumed up, filtered and returned to the second tank. Finally, the rink floor is renewed when clean hot water is spread on the ice by a towel behind the conditioner and then is frozen.” Years later, Zamboni’s son spoke to the Los Angeles Times about this breakthrough in ice-arena management. “One of the reasons he stuck with it was that everyone told him he was crazy,” Richard Zamboni told reporter Steve Harvey. “When he finally finished, he was so sick of it that he didn’t even bother painting it.”

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Norwegian-born figure skater Sonja Henie was the star of the Hollywood Ice Revue, which played to capacity crowds in several U.S. cities. Henie was based in Los Angeles and booked rehearsal sessions at Iceland in 1952. When she saw how quickly Zamboni’s eponymous invention resurfaced the ice, she asked him to make a portable one she could take with her on tour. He towed it himself to meet her tour in St. Louis, but he discovered that the Hollywood Ice Revue production was now in Chicago, and he continued on to that city. When the management of the Chicago Stadium ice arena witnessed Zamboni’s Zamboni in action, they placed their own order. Chicago Stadium was home to the Chicago Blackhawks, the National Hockey League (NHL) franchise, making the Blackhawks the first NHL team to use the ice-resurfacing machine. Another milestone for Zamboni’s company occurred at the 1960 Winter Olympics, held in the ski resort area of Squaw Valley, California. Ice-skating enthusiasts and rink managers from around the world saw the Zamboni in action during the Winter Games’ television broadcast.

The company Zamboni set up to produce and sell the ice resurfacers was the Frank J. Zamboni & Company. It built the vehicles in the city of Paramount, formerly the communities of Hynes and Clearwater. Zamboni continued to make improvements on the Zambonis, which for decades were powered by Volkswagen engines made for the Cabriolet model. By the late 1960s, the company had made 1,000 Zambonis and even opened an office in Switzerland to market them overseas. One of Zamboni’s California customers was Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, who had his own private ice rink at his home in Santa Rosa. “Charlie Brown once said there are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire and a Zamboni clearing the ice,” wrote New York Times journalist John Branch in 2009, referring to Schulz’s persecuted main character. “Fans at hockey games—children and the childlike, mostly—often cheer the Zamboni when it takes the ice. They applaud precision and jeer missed spots.”

Zamboni lived two blocks away from his factory in Paramount and was granting interviews at age 87 just weeks before he died of cardiac arrest at Long Beach Memorial Hospital on July 27, 1988. Among his other successful patents was a Zamboni-like machine that could remove moisture from artificial grass at open-air sports stadiums, which the Monsanto Chemical Company—makers of the artificial grass known as AstroTurf—commissioned him to build. Zamboni’s company remains family owned, with his namesake grandson in charge of a second manufacturing facility in Brantford, Ontario. Zamboni died just two months after losing his wife Norda Chamberlain Zamboni, whom he married in February of 1923. The couple had three children, including son Richard who became company president as his father attempted to shift into retirement mode. The elder Zamboni still visited the Paramount factory every day and was quoted in a Globe & Mail article that ran a mere 26 days before he died. “I never thought it would turn out this way,” Zamboni mused. “We did all right.”