A Half-Point Dip, and the Red Metal Holds Its Court

Friends, scrappers, and honest tradesmen of the red metal — the ledgers from Mysteel arrive on my desk this week, their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview for the ten-day span of August, and I read them by lamplight as a preacher reads scripture. The market has slipped a mere half of one percent on the day, and #1 Bare Bright still commands some six dollars and twenty cents the pound. A trifling dip! I have seen copper shrug off worse the way my old caged bear at Fort Wilkins shrugged off a summer fly.

Do not let a small red number spook you. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned then what I preach now: copper is not a mood, it is a necessity. It moves hand to hand, saloon to eating-house, and it does not stay down for long.

And of all copper's noble labors, none pleases me more than the still. Consider it, gentlemen — every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, and honest mountain moonshine you have ever savored passed through a throat of copper. The pot still, the alembic of the old monastery brothers, the coiled worm of the Appalachian hollow: all wrought from the red metal for one holy reason. Copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and casts them out, leaving the spirit sweet. A stainless vessel cannot do this trick — it is a dead, mute thing. Copper is alive to the work. Six centuries of distillers have known it, and no half-point wobble on a Friday ledger shall unteach them.

Nor does the red metal rest at the still. This very hour it sings through the wire that lights our streets, threads the plumbing that carries clean water to a man's basin, lines the bottoms of good cookware, and greens the roofs and gutters into that verdigris the poets admire. It spins in the electric motor and hums in the great data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless modern age. Everything that switches on owes copper a debt.

So when your buyer quotes you a shade under yesterday's figure, stand firm. Sort your grades true — Bare Bright bright, your #1 and #2 honest, your brass and radiators kept apart — and carry your load with the dignity of a man hauling the metal that makes both liquor and lightning possible.

A half-point down is a whisper, not a verdict. The red metal keeps its court, and we are all of us its loyal courtiers.

Yours in copper, spirits, and good conductance,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins