A Dip in the Ledger, a Steadiness in the Metal

I read the wires this morning over a cup gone cold and a pipe gone colder, and the headline announces a general retreat — copper, aluminum, stainless, brass, all marked down on this eleventh of June, 1926... forgive me, 2026; an old counterstamper loses a century now and again. IndexBox would have you believe the whole scrapyard has caught a chill at once.

And yet — permit me a wry smile — the day's own pulse tells a kinder tale. #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.39 the pound on the national average, and the copper market is in fact up six-tenths of one percent as I write. So while the broad metals shuffle backward together, the red metal steps quietly forward. That is the way of copper. It does not panic with the herd.

Let the aluminum and the stainless sulk. I have never trusted stainless, and I'll tell you plainly why: put a copper still beside a steel one and run the same fermented mash through each, and only the copper gives you liquor a Christian can drink. Copper draws the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor — binds them, scrubs them, hands you back a spirit clean and bright. The monks knew it in their alembics. The Appalachian man with his coiled worm knows it yet. Stainless cannot perform that small alchemy; it only holds the shape. The metal that makes good whiskey is the same metal you'll pull from a torn-down house — and it is the one holding its value today.

Think on all the red metal does while the prices wobble. It is the wire that lights your parlor and hums in the motors of these electric carriages. It is the plumbing that carries clean water to your tap, the bottom of the good cook's pan, the roof that weathers to that noble green. It is the brass on a door and the bronze on a monument. And in my counterstamping days it was the people's coin — a hundred thousand cents and more I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into, passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house, my own caged-bear Fort Wilkins among them.

So if the broad market has dipped, do not mistake it for copper losing faith with you. A scrapper's wisdom: a soft day in the ledger is a buyer's morning, not a seller's funeral. Sort your Bare Bright honest, keep your brass apart, and remember that the metal in your bin is the same metal that has clarified spirits since the cloisters and carries the lightning of this modern age.

Copper endures. It always has.

Yours in the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins