A Report Foresees 2035, But Copper Was Betting on Forever

Well, well — the learned men of Market Research Future have peered into their crystal alembic and pronounced upon the Copper Scrap Market clear out to the year 1935 plus a hundred, the year of our Lord 2035. A tidy trick, that, forecasting a decade I shall almost certainly not live to see. But I raise my cup to any prophet who bets on copper, for I have been placing that very wager my whole roving life.

Today the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.10 the pound, and the market slipped a mere two-tenths of one percent — a hiccup, a sneeze, nothing that would trouble a man who has watched the red metal outlast panics, wars, and three sorts of paper money. When I drove "DR. G. G. WILKINS" into better than a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, I did it because copper was the people's metal, passed from palm to palm in every saloon and eating-house — my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear, tooth-pulling chair and all. A report may speak of "market size." I speak of a metal that has been the size of civilization itself.

And why does a market researcher's spreadsheet still hum with copper in this modern age? Because nearly every good thing runs through it. The electrification of everything — motors, wire, the humming data-halls and electric carriages the young men swear by — all of it drinks copper by the ton. Your roof weathering to a noble green, the water line beneath your floor, the bright bottom of a good cookpot: copper, copper, copper.

But you know my truest devotion, so let me preach it once more. Copper is why your whiskey tastes clean. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of red metal by design, not accident. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise foul your glass, and it drags them out. A stainless vessel cannot do this; it is a bucket, not a chemist. From the monastery alembics of hooded monks to the Appalachian hollow at midnight, the men who make spirits have trusted one metal above all — and every scrap report that projects copper's rise is, whether the authors know it or not, projecting the future of good drink.

So let the analysts chart their curves to 2035. The scrapper hauling his radiators and bright wire this afternoon already knows what they will conclude: the red metal endures. Sell your Bare Bright honest, keep your still shining, and pour a small one to the conductor of all things.

Yours in the everlasting red metal, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins