Frank Patrick’s patents

Frank and Lester Patrick were acknowledged as great hockey innovators who introduced many new rules to the game. But only two inventions reached the Canadian patent office. Both were filed on March 25, 1913 and issued on June 16, 1914.

One was a system for distributing brine in pipes for ice rinks or chutes, and the other for a toboggan slide. The latter application explained that it “relates to an artificial ice chute for toboggans, slides and the like, and the invention comprises the application to a toboggan chute or trough of means for artificially producing a frozen surface thereon …”

I believe both applications were related to the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, to which Frank won the concession contract, and for whom he planned to build a toboggan slide. “The toboggan slide, it is stated, will be one of the exposition’s ‘thrillers,’ and will be 1,200 feet long,” The Vancouver Sun of April 23, 1913 reported.

It was intended to wind around the expo’s ice hippodrome building. However, Frank’s involvement with the expo was derailed, and neither the building nor the slide came to fruition. Still, when Calgary was planning an artificial ice rink in 1913, newspapers stated that “The patent Patrick system of ice making will be used.” Which presumably referred to the brine system.

The diagrams list Frank as the inventor (per patent attorney Rowland Brittain) — and are signed by witnesses John M. Goodwin and Robert McDougall, although I don’t know who they are. The full applications and diagrams can be seen below.

I am not the first to note Frank’s patents. Library and Archives Canada mentioned the refrigeration patent in a 2015 blog post about hockey innovations.