On July 22, 1998, the temperature in Seattle hit ninety, fifteen degrees above the usual high. A few days later, it was ninety-five, then ninety-seven. Bill Just, the owner of a local ice-cube distribution company, was as pleased as you could imagine. “This was what I’d been waiting for,” he told me recently. “I was thinking, Oh, yes!” Just, who used to play drums in a Las Vegas lounge act called the Current, moved to Seattle with his family twenty-two years ago so that his children could grow up in a more wholesome environment. He took a job delivering packaged ice, and eventually formed a company called All Seasons Ice—a name that carries more than a hint of wishful thinking. The American ice-cube trade is sharply seasonal, and Seattle’s season is short and rather halfhearted. Washington State has nothing like the ice market enjoyed by Southern California, Texas, and Florida—“the ice belt,” as Just calls it. In those places, he said, “You might have to deliver to the supermarket three or four times a day in the summer—now, that’s selling some damned ice.” For a few glorious days in 1998, as the people of Seattle filled their picnic coolers, Bill Just experienced ice-belt demand.

But the heat wave continued into a second week, demand outstripped supply, and Just became anxious. “We’re not geared up for that kind of weather,” he said. “We didn’t have enough ice stored up.” Just’s anxiety turned into a kind of panic. “It became a nightmare,” he said. “We were bringing ice from all over the place—California, Portland, everyplace we could buy it. We spent half a million dollars to try to keep up with this mess.” Still, customers were going short. Most alarming, Just found that he could not satisfy Safeway, with whom he had an exclusive contract to supply more than a hundred stores in the region. “This was twenty-five per cent of my income,” he said. “And they’re the kind of company that says, ‘If you can’t take care of us, then screw you.’ I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. This will never happen again as long as we live.’ ”

Just struggled on to the end of the crisis. The weather cooled; demand fell. Then, one day in the fall, Just made a routine phone call to the frozen-food manager at a Safeway in Bothell, a few miles down the road from the All Seasons office, and asked about the store’s ice needs for that week. The reply was devastating. The manager told him not to deliver; he did not need All Seasons ice that week, and he might never need it again. He said that, from now on, Safeway would be selling its own ice, made in the store. Just drove to Bothell. Ten minutes later, he was standing in front of a machine that he had never seen before, but whose reputation he knew very well. Just says that he resisted the urge to kick it. “Oh, it was ugly, very ugly,” he remembers, half laughing. “It was the monster from the deep, coming to bite you.”

The Ice Factory is a humming white cabinet with glass doors, on top of which, at head height, stands an icemaker, programmed to send a new bag thumping down when the cabinet is less than two-thirds full. The machine automatically makes the ice, weighs it, bags it and seals it, and drops the bag right there at the front of the store, cutting out the nuisance of fork-lift trucks and wet floors and phone calls to retired Vegas drummers. For the past four years, the Ice Factory has been used by its inventor to force an entry into American ice, and, while national attention has been turned to other places in the economy—toward fleeting, digital products that never need to be hit hard with a sledgehammer—there has been a revolution in the simplest solid thing you can buy in a supermarket. The Ice Factory has brought sudden confusion into what has long been an industry of small-scale, family-run firms, with such appealing names as Frosty Ice, Mr. Ice, and I.C.E. Ice.

On that morning in Bothell, Just turned to the Safeway frozen-food manager and said, “Well, I hope these things don’t work as well as they say they do. I hope this isn’t what it’s made out to be.” Then he took a photograph of the machine and drove back to his office.

“The words ‘pompous ass’ mean anything to you?” a prominent ice manufacturer asked me when I mentioned the name of the Ice Factory’s inventor, James Stuart. The manufacturer continued, “The ice industry is not a big industry, and everybody knows everybody else, and he comes in and basically says, ‘You’re a bunch of idiots. I’m going to show you how to make money. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ Right away, you think, Who is this jerk?”

Jim Stuart is the chairman and C.E.O. of Packaged Ice, a Houston-based firm that is the only publicly traded ice company in the United States. A former accountant in his late fifties, he is a friendly, slightly overweight man, who wears pastel polo shirts and likes to keep ice on hand for sucking and chewing. He lives in the western suburbs of Houston, where he sleeps only four hours a night, and gets up in the morning to the Weather Channel, checking for heat waves. When we met recently, he said, “People ask me, ‘What do you do? Golf? Tennis?’ I say, ‘I do ice. I just do ice.’ ” We were driving from Houston to Austin late at night. There was a cooler in the back of the car, full of sodas on ice—“the best ice, crystal-clear ice,” Stuart said—and the sound of shifting Cokes provided additional percussion to a three-track Sarah Brightman CD on the stereo, which was playing very softly in a perpetual loop, hour after hour. When Stuart is fully upbeat, his manner has an acquired air reminiscent of the motivational posters he buys in bulk for the walls of his ice plants. (“Integrity is one of several paths. . .”; “Individuals say ‘I.’ Teams say ‘we.’ ”) Stuart’s ice evangelism includes a trace of self-mockery, suggesting that he understands how ice might appear undeserving of all this bullish single-mindedness. And, in truth, there are other things on his mind: we talked about his wife and son and granddaughter, and he showed me a photograph of himself, dressed as Elvis Presley, at a recent company retreat. He has a collection of a hundred guns, and, perhaps more alarming, he has seen Agatha Christie’s long-running London whodunnit, “The Mousetrap,” three times. But Stuart would like it to be known that schemes of national domination are not put into action ironically. “All I think about all day long is packaged ice,” he said. Now and then, we passed through a small, dark town—a flash of Wendy’s and Texaco—and Stuart would say flatly, “We have all the ice here. Anywhere you buy ice, it’s ours.”

Stuart sells ice in bags. It is the kind of ice that—according to one devoted ice professional in Texas—should turn itself from a jagged eight-pound rock into a thousand dancing cubes with one clean drop of the bag onto a hard surface. In common with the officers and two hundred and forty corporate members of the International Packaged Ice Association (I.P.I.A.), Stuart is hostile toward the most common alternative—homemade ice. I.P.I.A. members regard the use of freezer trays as a strange and dirty habit, akin to licking a handrail in a subway car. Homemade cubes are unacceptably white, and they carry mysterious flavors. “They taste of air,” one professional iceman said to me. Another, Paul Hendler, who runs an ice company in Mamaroneck, New York, said, “My wife threatens me with the trays. She calls me up, saying, ‘You’re bringing home a bag of ice tonight or the trays are going in the freezer.’ She really knows how to hurt a guy.”