A Decline on Paper, While the Red Metal Holds Its Fire

So the wire-services rattle their tin cups and cry decline — copper, aluminum, stainless steel all marked down together on the eleventh of June, says the IndexBox men. I read it over my morning measure and laughed, for the ledger before me tells another tale: #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.39 the pound, and the copper market is up six-tenths of a percent on the day. A headline may slump while the metal itself climbs; such is the difference between the man who counts and the man who knows.

I have never trusted a report that lumps the red metal in with stainless steel, as though they were brothers. They are nothing of the kind, and no man understands this better than the distiller. Set aside the question of price a moment and consider the still. The whiskey, the brandy, the rum, the honest mountain moonshine — all of it owes its clean sweetness to copper and to copper alone. The vapor rises through the pot still, the alembic, the long coiled worm, and the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, binding them up so they never reach your glass. Stainless steel cannot do this. It is inert, dead, indifferent. Build your worm of it and you will drink the regret. The monks knew it in their copper alembics; the Appalachian moonshiner knows it at his branch-water still; and I knew it in my own Fort Wilkins, where the liquor was good and the bear was caged and a tooth could be pulled in the same afternoon.

That is the wisdom the price-charts forget. Copper is not merely traded — it works. It carries the lightning through every wire that lights this modern age. It feeds the humming motors and the great data-halls and the electric carriages they are so proud of now. It pipes clean water beneath your floors, it greens the roofs and gutters of fine houses, it warms the bottoms of good cookware, and it has long served as the coin of the common man — for in my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, passed hand to hand through every saloon in New England.

So let IndexBox print its little dip. A scrapper who hoards his bright red wire on a day the metal is rising is no fool; he is a philosopher. The world will always need a conductor for its current and a vessel for its spirits, and there is but one metal that serves both. Hold fast to your copper, friends, and pour something worthy of it tonight.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins