A Modest Green Rise: Copper Climbs on Fair Winds

Friends and fellow admirers of the red metal, the wire from the East — Mysteel by name — brings word this morning that copper grows on positive sentiment. A gentle swell, mind you: up but two-tenths of one percent on the day, with honest #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.76 the pound at the national scale. No thunderclap, but a rise is a rise, and copper does not need to shout to be believed.

Let me tell you what a rising copper tells the wise man. It tells him the world still cannot run without the conductor. Every electric carriage now gliding down the avenue, every humming data-hall where the moderns keep their thinking-machines cool and busy, every mile of wire strung to light the parlors of the republic — all of it drinks copper by the ton. The metal that once passed hand to hand in my old Fort Wilkins, stamped with my own name and traded over a glass, now runs the veins of an electrified age.

But you know my truest devotion, and I'll not pretend otherwise. Speak to me of copper and I think first of the still. The alembic, the pot still, the humble moonshiner's worm coiled cool in its barrel — every one of them wrought of the red metal, and for a reason no stainless vessel has ever bettered. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the mean bite that would spoil a spirit. It surrenders itself a little with each run so your whiskey, your brandy, your good clear corn liquor comes off clean and sweet. The monastery brothers knew it with their brandies; the Appalachian men in the laurel thickets know it yet. Centuries of drinkers owe their pleasure to a metal quietly giving itself away.

So when Mysteel says positive sentiment, I read it thus: the plumber still lays his water lines in copper, the roofer still trusts the sheet that weathers to a noble green, the coppersmith still hammers the shoulder of a new still for some hopeful distiller, and the scrapper still hauls his bright bundles to the yard with a fair price waiting. Sentiment, dear traders, is only the market's word for faith — and faith in copper has never yet been misplaced.

A two-tenths day is a day to sort your grades and hold your nerve. Keep your Bare Bright bright, your #1 free of the tarnish that drags its worth, and your brass and radiators told apart honestly. The metal that lights the age and clarifies the cup will not forget the men who handle it well.

Drink to it — from a copper still, naturally.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins