Wave pool

A wave pool is a swimming pool in which there are artificially generated, reasonably large waves, similar to those of the ocean. Wave pools are often a major feature of water parks. Siam Park City Water Park in Thailand is home to the world's largest wave pool certified by Guinness World Records, and Siam Park (Tenerife) in Spain is home to the biggest man made waves (about 3 meters (9.8 ft)) in the world.

Several locations claim to have developed the first wave pool in the United States, including Big Surf in Tempe, Arizona, in 1969 [1], 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.

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