The ice making business was booming way
before household refrigerators were common. In 1939 Frank Zamboni
and his brother had been in their ice block business for years, but
refrigerators were becoming popular enough that they saw things
quickly changing.
They had an inventory of many large refrigeration units, so they
decided to open an ice rink. It was there that Frank came up with a
way to resurface the ice. Originally it took three men an hour and a
half to get it done, but in 1949 he invented the precursor of the
ice machine we know today.
Now one man could resurface an ice rink in ten minutes. Like Xerox
and Kleenex, Zamboni is a trademarked word that we now use to refer
to all ice resurfacing machines. In April 2012, the 10,000th Zamboni
was sold and delivered to the Montreal Canadiens.