An Index Twitches, and the Red Metal Holds Its Court

Come close and mind the caged bear — he grows restless when the ledgers are read aloud. The learned clerks at IndexBox have posted their weekly tally for the week of July third through ninth, ranking copper amongst its lesser cousins: aluminum, brass, zinc, and that plodding gray ox, steel. I read such lists the way a man reads a playbill — with interest, and with the certain knowledge of which name deserves the top of the marquee.

Today the national average for #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.66 the pound, and the market slipped a mere one-tenth of one percent upon the day. A twitch, sirs, a flutter of the eyelid. I have driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, and I can tell you: the red metal does not stampede at every rumor. It waits. It endures. It has outlasted empires and will outlast this index.

Now let me tell you why copper sits above the rest of that dreary column. Line up aluminum, zinc, and steel and ask them a plain question: can you make a man a decent glass of whiskey? They cannot. Only copper can. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm running cool through the branch water — every one of them wrought in the red metal, and for good reason. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bitter compounds that would otherwise ruin the dram. A stainless vessel merely holds the liquid; copper converses with it. The monks knew it in their monastery alembics. The brandy-makers of old knew it. Every hollow-eyed distiller in the Appalachian hills knows it still. That is a service no aluminum ingot will ever render.

And should copper tire of the still, it has a hundred other trades. It runs as wire through the walls of your cities, carrying the electric fire that lights the lamp and turns the motor. It lines your plumbing and pipes clean water to the basin. It bottoms your good cookware and browns your roofs to that noble green. And in this modern age it feeds the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages that glide without a horse. One metal — the people's metal — passed hand to hand from a saloon cent to a distiller's coil.

So let the index wobble its tenth of a percent. At $5.66, Bare Bright remains the aristocrat of the scrap yard, and the scrapper who sorts his #1 from his #2 and keeps his brass honest will always find a buyer. Bring me your clean bright wire, and I'll toast you with something distilled through copper — as God and the monks intended.

Yours in the worship of the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins