A Penny's Dip, a Distiller's Devotion: Copper Holds Its Court

The wire out of IndexBox this eighth of July tells us copper has stepped back a trifle — down eleven parts in a thousand on the day — while aluminum puffs itself up and steel lies flat as a griddle cake. Bare bright, that gleaming #1 darling of the honest scrapper, fetches near $5.46 the pound at the national reckoning. A shaved farthing, I say, and no cause for the pawning of one's coat.

For I have handled copper in quantities that would humble a bank clerk. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending them out from Fort Wilkins — past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair — into every saloon and eating-house in New England. Copper was ever the people's metal, warm from a stranger's palm, and a metal so beloved does not tremble at a single day's downward tick.

Consider what the red metal does, and you will not fret over pennies. Above all things I cherish the copper still. The pot still, the alembic — the very reason your whiskey, your brandy, your mountain moonshine tastes of grain and fruit and not of struck matches. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles, and casts them out. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet miracle; it merely holds. From the monastery brothers hunched over their alembics to the Appalachian man tending his coiled worm by moonlight, the craft has trusted copper for six hundred years and more. That is not a fashion. That is a covenant.

And copper's other lives march on regardless of the ticker. It runs as wire through the walls of every lit house, it carries water clean through the plumber's lines, it lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, it greens gracefully upon a fine roof, it turns the electric motor and now feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages this restless age adores. Every one of these appetites is growing, not shrinking. A metal so demanded does not stay cheap for long.

So if you have bare bright coiled in your bin, or a heap of #2, some radiators or a bundle of insulated wire, do not let a one-point dip stampede you to the scale in a panic. Copper corrects; copper always corrects. It is red and it is patient, and it has outlasted empires, currencies, and better men than the fellows who move these markets.

Hold your copper as the distiller holds his still — with faith. The vapor always rises again.

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