The wire services come in this morning with a long face: IndexBox declares copper and brass slipping on the fourth of June, with aluminum and steel lying flat as a forgotten anvil. And yet — mark me well — my own ledger shows the red metal nudged up six-tenths of a percent on the day, with #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.39 the pound. So which is it, friends? A drop or a rise? I tell you the truth of it: copper does not care much for the headline. It has outlasted every panic since the first smith breathed fire on ore.
Let the speculators fret over a paper dip in brass. Brass is copper married to zinc, and a fine marriage it is — the metal of valves and fittings and the lockwork of an honest door. A soft session does not unmake centuries of usefulness.
But you know where my heart turns, as it always does: to the still. When a man drops a few cents on copper, he forgets that without this metal there would be no decent liquor on God's earth. The pot still, the alembic the old monks bent over in their cold cellars, the worm coiled in the Appalachian creek — all copper, every one. Why? Because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise turn your whiskey to bile. Stainless steel cannot do it. A copper still gives you spirit clean as a mountain morning. A price chart cannot taste that, but your tongue can.
And copper's other lives march on no matter the day's quotation. It runs as wire through every wall, carrying the lightning we have tamed; it threads the plumbing that brings water to your basin; it lines the bottoms of good cookware; it greens upon the roofs of cathedrals and courthouses. In this electric age it feeds the humming motors, the great data houses, the carriages that run without a horse. The world wants more of it, not less.
I spent my younger years driving DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents, watching them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, and it is the people's metal now. A scrapper hauling bright wire to the yard this afternoon trades in the same substance that clarifies a barrel of brandy and lights a city.
So pay the day's dip no mind. Sell your Bare Bright at a fair $5.39, raise a copper-distilled dram, and remember what the chartists forget: the metal endures.
Yours in the red metal, ever and always — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.