Last night, during the Bruins/Leafs game, ESPN showed a clip from a different Bruins/Leafs game, one from a long time ago. It might have been from the 40’s?
The weirdest thing, looking at old hockey clips, is that the goalies didn’t wear masks. This is always jarring. But every now and then, I’m also taken aback by the reminder that humanity’s had indoor ice rinks for a really long time. People didn’t have refrigerators in their houses until the 20’s. They started giving out the Stanley Cup in 1893. Were folks playing indoor hockey thirty years before they had their own fridge??
Technically, yes. The Montreal Hockey Club, which won that first Stanley Cup, played at the Victoria Skating Rink. The Victoria Skating Rink was indoor. That rink was naturally frozen, though, which I think means they just kept the building unheated. Still, it could have been mechanically frozen, had Montreal wanted to do that. Mechanically frozen ice already existed in 1893. It was invented in the 1870’s by a guy named John Gamgee (no relation to Samwise), who opened the Glaciarium in England in 1876. He laid copper pipes on top of a concrete surface, pumped a coolant through them, and covered the pipes with water which then froze. By the mid-1890’s, there were mechanically frozen rinks in Baltimore and New York. These things had crossed the Atlantic before McKinley got shot.
The approach hasn’t changed much since the Glaciarium, except that it sounds like these days, they put the pipes inside the concrete. They just make the concrete cold enough to freeze the water on top of it. I assume that they’re getting better and better at making the concrete colder and colder, and that’s why they don’t have to air condition arenas down to 32º. But it’s impressive that John Gamgee’s general idea has stuck around. And it’s still always mind-blowing that we can make things colder. Making things hotter is way simpler. You just light something on fire.
