A Slight Dip, Says the Report — The Red Metal Holds Its Court

The learned scribes at IndexBox report on this two-and-twentieth of December that copper has dipped slightly — and I confess I read the word dipped with a distiller's fondness, for dipping is the very heart of the trade I love best. A dip, a nudge, a whisker of a decline. Meanwhile the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.99 the pound, and the broader market ticks up a bashful 0.1 percent. Call that a dip if you like; I call it a metal that refuses to be humbled.

Let a headline wobble as it pleases. The red metal has weathered panics, wars, and the counting-houses of men far cleverer than I. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and every one of them passed hand to hand across the bar of my Fort Wilkins — past the caged bear, past the tooth-pulling chair — because copper was the people's metal then, and it is the people's metal still.

And here is what no daily report will tell you: the true measure of copper is not a percentage but a flavor. Consider the pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm sweating in a mountain hollow. Why copper and never cold stainless? Because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils — the reeking compounds that would make your whiskey taste of struck matches and spoilt eggs. From the monastery brothers laboring over their alembics to the Appalachian moonshiner tending his still by lantern-light, the craft has trusted one metal to make spirit clean. A dip of a tenth of a percent changes that not one whit. Every clean dram of brandy, rum, and corn liquor owes its sweetness to the red conductor.

Conductor — aye, there is the other tale. The same metal that purifies your whiskey now hums through the wires of the electrified age: the motors, the water lines threaded through your walls, the green-weathered roofs, the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that the young men chase after. Whatever the future builds, it builds on copper. There is no wire of stainless, no still of aluminum, no honest scrap yard that turns away a clean coil of #1 Bare Bright.

So gather your radiators and your insulated wire, sort your #2 from your brass, and pay the day's headline the respect it deserves — which is a wry smile and no more. Copper has dipped a thousand times and risen a thousand and one. At six dollars the pound, on the eve of the year's turning, the red metal keeps its court and asks only that we keep faith with it.

Yours in copper, spirits, and the everlasting shine,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins