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And Zamboni is named after a single visionary man. Technically, three men. Two, I guess. Let's just go with Frank.
Frank J. Zamboni is widely credited as the inventor of the Zamboni or the ice resurfacing machine. And the reason why is because he invented it. That's right.
We go back to 1940 when Frank Zamboni and Lauren Zamboni, his brother and their cousin said, Hey, let's open up an ice skating rink. We're in the ice business anyway. We have an ice and refrigeration plant, so we know how to make plenty of ice. Let's just spread that out over a floor and contain it and charge people to skate on it.
Yeah. That's a really good idea. Apparently it was extremely popular. The problem is when you have people skating on a rink of ice, it gets cut up pretty quickly.
There's like divots and scratches and it's just it looks terrible. It looks messy. So you want to make it look good again and you have to resurface it. And resurfacing is a process.
It's actually what Zamboni's do is we'll see. But originally before the Zamboni was invented, for the first couple of years that they owned the ice rink, Frank and Lauren's and the unnamed cousin had to do this by hand. So they would get a tractor that would drag like a blade that would kind of like shave the top of the ice. Then you have people following in the tractors wake cleaning up ice shavings, wetting the ice again and then towing it up to make it smooth.
And the whole thing would take like an hour and a half just for this one rink. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And I know you I think you were joking when you said it looks terrible. So they need to make it look good.
The problem with chopped ice of course is you can't skate on it very well at all. Well, that too. Yeah. So yeah, taking way too long, too much human hours, too many hands involved.
So Frank was like, hey, listen, I was born into a family that made and worked on farming equipment and how to make stuff and fix stuff. And so I'm going to build a machine. And so Frank Zamboni built the model A Zamboni ice resurface or in 1949. Look up a picture of this thing when you get a chance.
Yeah. It's really cool looking. It looks like you would think a model A Zamboni might look, which is to say kind of like an army Jeep with a big wooden bin on top of it. And it looks like a little mechanical ladder, I guess, that brought ice up.
Yeah. So the reason it looked like a Jeep is because it was built on top of a Jeep chassis. It basically just cut the top off and built the rest of the Zamboni on top of it. They also used parts from an oil derrick and the hydraulic cylinder from a Douglas aircraft fighter plane.
And I don't know if we mention it or not, but Frank's J Zamboni was a mechanical genius. Yeah, I did. Okay. Well, I second that.
So this was 1949. That was the first Zamboni. And what's interesting is the ads clearly show essentially what looked like would have been the prototype, you know? Yeah.
So that's what the first Zamboni's were like. So it took a few years to really catch on. But they had some pretty big customers because what they were doing was providing a solution that was way more widespread than you probably would have thought. Anybody who made any kind of money from ice skating on ice really was facing all these same problems.
So the idea of a machine that could do this and a fraction of the time at a fraction of the human hours, that was a big advancement in the field. Yeah, I know, you know, when people complain about machines taking over jobs that people did, you know, sometimes it's a really good idea. Yeah. No, some of the early clients were the Boston Bruins and the Chicago Blackhawks or the NHL figure skaters, Sonia Henny, of course.
And in 1967, they said things are going so well, we're going to open up a second factory in Ontario because they were turning out those Zamboni's at a pretty good clip. Even though it's the kind of thing that requires a lot of maintenance though, it's usually the kind of thing you hope to buy once. Yeah. And one of the things that seems to have really kind of boosted the company's images.
People were the official ice resurverser for the 1961 Olympics in Squaw Valley. And that really, I think, kind of sealed the deal for everybody. And then they also were, they went to the Soviet Union with Ice Capades in 1967 too. So the 60s were a big decade for the Zamboni company.
Should we take a break? Yeah, because we're going to come back since there's plenty of decades after the 60s. That's right. We'll be right back.
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We created our own podcast called Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it.
First people to do podcasts. Pretty wide range of podcasts. Starting in Trent. But this one's extra special.
So how do we actually come up with the name Hey, Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Oh, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers.
This is how you guys remember going down. Yes, I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast. We would call in and say, Hey, Jonas.
And then I broke down my little notepad. Hey, Jonas. And offered it up as a potential title. Oh, fuck yeah.
But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey, Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen, we don't care where you hear it. So since those early Zambonys, they've changed quite a bit.
Ice resurfaces in general over the years. Just gotten better and better. They're still making improvements. There's one coming down the pike soon that's even more advanced than the last.
Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. They're always trying to make these things a little bit better, run a little cleaner. That's so Zamboni.
So how these things actually work is exactly sort of how they did it by hand, but a machine is doing it. You're basically just giving the surface of the ice a shave with a blade. The blade is about 77 to 96 inches depending on the size of the machine. And NHL says just give me a real close trim, like a one 30 second of an inch down.
You don't have to scrape too much. The total ice from an NHL rink, let's say, that you would scrape off is about 60 cubic feet. Yes. And on either side of the blade are up to four comfort strips that give a close and comfortable shave.
Not buying that one. So that's generally like the main thing that's going on. You're trimming the ice. But the problem is when you trim ice, there's still little divots.
It's not smooth necessarily. It's just uniform. So what the Zamboni does is it sprays water out in front of the blade. And that water is picked up by the Zamboni itself, kind of mixed up, I think, with the water or the snow that it picks up or the ice it generates.
You just call it snow. And then out of the rear, they put down new water, warm water that remelt the ice. And then they have essentially a squeegee at the back that smooths the whole thing over, which if that sounds familiar, that's what humans did. They just figured out how to put all those things into a machine.
Yeah. And you know what? It's even better than that. Okay.
Because that snow that they're picking up gets melted and goes into a tank and gets washed to be reused. It's a beautifully elegant sort of closed loop system. That makes sense because it's you're cleaning up the ice. And collecting it as snow is ice shavings.
And then you're laying down more water to re-freeze. It would make sense to just make the whole thing as close to the system as possible. Yeah. And they're heavy.
If it's full of water, again, depending on the machine, you can go anywhere between 7,000 to 11,000 pounds, total weight. And they hold it anywhere from 210 or so to about 265 gallons of water. Yeah. One of the things you said that they are always kind of innovating.
One of the things that's really become a thing in ice resurfacing world is electric ice resurfaces, which is a really good step forward. Because most of the time they're resurfacing ice in an enclosed ice rink. And if you've ever been to like a skating rink when they're resurfacing the ice and it's not an electric Zamboni? Yeah, I played hockey for a couple of years.
Okay. So, you know, the whole place stinks of car exhaust and somehow hot pretzels. I don't know how. Every single ice rink in the world smells like the hot pretzels that they sell.
For some reason, really carries. It's a very distinct smell. I love it. Interesting.
I never noticed that. Check it out next time. I'm okay. You'll be like, oh my God, it really smells like hot pretzels.
I haven't skated in a while. I got pretty good for a little while, but it's been a minute. Did you? Yeah.
We got into it locally here. Like a friend of mine worked at a rink and they had called it Stick Time, which is basically like after hours. Hockey players could pay like 10 bucks to go up there and display like pick up games. Cool.
And so we all kind of got into it and got gear and I was never any good at it. But I got to where I could skate okay a little bit and move around a little bit. Yeah. It's very hard.
I was a shameful skater considering I grew up in Ohio where Ponds just froze completely solid all the time. Yeah. Weak ankles, I guess. So, Zamboni, we mentioned being a proprietary eponym that kind of giveth and take it away because it's great when people just call any ice resurface or Zamboni.
Not so great when you don't win the contract to the Winter Olympics, which is what happened in 2010 in Vancouver when those Olympia machines won the contract and those machines malfunctioned. And all over the news, they're talking about the fact that the Zamboni's aren't working. Yeah. And Zamboni actually released the press release saying like, Hey, those are not Zamboni brand machines.
And in fact, Zamboni's got trucked in to finish the job after the Olympia machines to stop working. I guess it was just a catastrophe. I read a like an interview from the time and it was like, like this is, you're on the world stage and your stuff is not working well. So the Olympics are on hold right now because your machine isn't doing the job.
I was trying to picture a press conference instead of just a press release where they were like, you know, we shut down now, we want to make it clear. These are not Zamboni's. These are just these are ice resurfaces. They are not Zamboni's.
And the press is like, right, right. But what's actually wrong with the Zamboni's? They're like, no, no, no, they aren't Zamboni's just over and over and over. And he gets so like frustrated that it's no start bleeding.
Does somebody hand you a clinic? Oh my God. Amazing. So check, I say we wrap this whole one up because we basically reached the end here, don't you think?
You should mention price. These things are very, very expensive. The cheapest one that you actually need a tractor to drag this thing around is about 10 grand. And I saw Zamboni say that they can go up above 500,000 sometimes.
That's a gold plated one. If you look up Zamboni price, there are a lot of articles from like smaller towns, like civic organizations that are saying like, you know, do we have $165,000 to allocate toward a Zamboni for our city rink. That's a big expenditure. Yeah.
The most expensive one only functions with Avion that has been used to wash and endowardies here. That's why it's so expensive. I'm not buying that either. So I say short stuffs out.
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