History
Several locations claim to have developed the first wave pool in the United States, including Big Surf in Tempe, Arizona, in 1969, and Point Mallard Park's Aquatic Center, in the city of Decatur, Alabama.
Wave pools go as far back as the 19th Century, as famous fantasy castle builder Ludwig II of Bavaria electrified a lake to create breaking waves.
The first wave pool was designed and built in 1927 in Budapest, Hungary in the known Gellért Baths, and appeared in a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer documentary (James A. Fitzpatrick's Traveltalks) about the city in 1938, as one of the main tourist attractions. On the other hand, in Palisades Amusement Park, a famed center atop the New Jersey Palisades across the Hudson River from New York City, had a salt-water wave pool during the 1940s. This was a huge pool whose waves were generated by a waterfall at one end. The pool in Point Mallard Park was developed in the early 1970s after Mayor Gilmer Blackburn saw enclosed "wave-making" swimming pools in Germany and thought one could be a tourist attraction in the United States. J. Austin Smith, an Ohio wave pool manufacturer, worked with the city of Decatur to design and install the wave pool in 1970. The first indoor wave pool in the U.S. was opened at Bolingbrook, Illinois, at the Bolingbrook Aquatic Center in 1982.
Read more about this topic: Wave Pool
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)