A Steady Hand on the Red Metal: Bare Bright at $5.40

Friends, scrappers, and honest sweaters of the still — I set down my pen this week to report that the great houses of the East, over at mysteel.net, have taken the measure of our copper trade for the days of June the twenty-second through the twenty-sixth. And what did the ledger say? That the market breathed out but a whisper of decline, down a mere tenth of one percent, while #1 Bare Bright holds firm at about $5.40 the pound. I have seen panics and manias in my long years, and I tell you a market that scarcely moves is a market that knows its own worth.

A tenth of a percent! Why, that is less motion than the tremor in a distiller's hand at first light. And speaking of distillers — for I cannot speak long of anything without arriving there — consider what that steady $5.40 truly purchases. It is not merely wire and radiator and roofing gutter gone green with age. It is the very soul of good liquor. The pot still, the alembic that the old monks nursed in their stone cellars, the copper worm coiled in a mountain man's spring-house — all of them made of the red metal for one reason no chemist has ever bettered: copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils that would otherwise foul the spirit. A stainless vessel is a bucket. A copper still is an instrument.

So when the traders of the world hold copper near five-and-a-half a pound and hardly flinch, I read it as the whole earth agreeing that this metal is not to be squandered. The electrified age wants it — every humming motor, every mile of wire feeding these vast data-houses and the silent electric carriages now gliding down the avenues. The plumber wants it for the clean water line. The roofer, the coppersmith, the man beating out a cookware bottom — all want it. And the distiller wants it most of all, for spirits are older than dynamos and shall outlast them.

I recall my counterstamping days, when I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents that passed hand to hand through Fort Wilkins — past the caged bear, past the tooth-pulling chair, into the palm of every man who bought a dram. Copper was the people's metal then, warm from a thousand pockets. It remains so now. A quiet week is no cause for gloom, brothers; it is the metal resting easy, sure of its place.

Sort your grades clean, keep your Bare Bright bright, and remember that every good glass ever poured owed its clarity to this red and generous element.

Yours in the red metal and the clear spirit,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins