The most famous machine in hockey is named after a man who first made ice for a living, not for skating.
Frank Zamboni grew up in Idaho and came to California as a young man to join his brother in the electrical business. He moved into refrigeration, serving dairy farms and produce vendors, and made blocks of ice. Sales fell once home refrigerators spread, so the brothers built the Iceland skating rink in Paramount in 1939.
Keeping that ice smooth was slow work. According to Sports Illustrated, resurfacing was a three- or four-man job that took about an hour and a half. Zamboni began experimenting in 1942. Wikipedia reports that a 1947 attempt on an army surplus chassis was abandoned, and that his Model A was a working machine by 1949.
He filed a patent application in May 1949, and the patent was issued in 1953. The Zamboni Company was started in 1950. Sports Illustrated says Zamboni tried to register the company as "Paramount Engineering," but the name was already in use, so he used his own. The company applied for a trademark in March 1964, and it was granted in May 1965 for ice resurfacing machines.
The machine's fame spread when figure skater Sonja Henie saw one at Iceland and, in the magazine's telling, said she had to have one of her own. Zamboni followed her tour to Chicago, where his son Richard helped assemble her machine.
Then came the problem every successful brand name faces. By 1987 Sports Illustrated could write that the name had become a generic term for all ice-resurfacing machines. Merriam-Webster still lists it as a trademark. The company, according to Sports Illustrated, says, through Richard Zamboni, that the word should be capitalized and used as an adjective, as in "a Zamboni machine".
The name itself is simply a surname. The sources read do not explain where the Zamboni family name comes from, so this page does not guess. The real story is a man whose name became so attached to a job that other makers' machines get called by it too.