A Mere Two-Tenths: Copper Holds Her Ground at $5.39

The dispatch from IndexBox arrives with all the gravity of a sermon and the news of a sigh: copper and brass down, aluminum and steel lying flat as a dead man's hatband. But mark the figure before you mourn — a fall of two-tenths of one percent. Why, I have lost more dignity than that stumbling out of my own Fort Wilkins after a long evening. The red metal sits at $5.39 the pound for honest #1 Bare Bright, and a slip so slight is not a wound; it is a flutter of the eyelash.

Let the speculators wring their hands. I have driven my name into a hundred thousand copper cents and watched them pass from saloon-keeper to tooth-aching farmer to barkeep again, and I learned a thing the ticker cannot teach: copper does not care about a single day's mood. She is the patient metal, the conductor, the artisan's confidant.

Consider what no headline ever credits her for. Somewhere this very morning a distiller is firing his pot still — a great gleaming alembic of beaten copper — and the spirit rising through that red throat is being cleansed. The copper seizes the sulfurous devils and the rank volatiles out of the vapor and holds them fast, the way a good sheriff holds a troublemaker. A stainless still cannot perform this small miracle; it merely conveys. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm chuckling under a creekbank, every clean swallow of whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its very smoothness to copper. Two-tenths of a percent will not change that lineage one whit.

And copper's other labors march on regardless of the trader's gloom. She runs through the walls of your house as water line and lamp wire; she warms the bottom of your wife's best pan; she greens upon the roof in stately patience; she spins inside every electric motor and now feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that the young men prize. Brass and bronze, her noble children, may dip a trifle with her — but they too were born of the red metal and will rise when she rises.

So I counsel the scrapper: do not dump your hoard in a panic over a number smaller than a gnat's whisker. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, strip your insulated wire clean, keep your brass apart from your radiators, and wait with the serenity of a man who knows what he holds. Steel may lie flat and aluminum may yawn — but copper, down a breath today, remains the metal that makes good liquor possible and the modern age electric.

Keep your stills bright and your conscience cleaner. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins