Copper and Aluminum Rise Together, Yet the Red Metal Reigns

Well now, the ticker-men at IndexBox report this eleventh of August that copper and aluminum have both climbed while the rest of the metals sit stable as a courthouse bench. Cheering news for the scrap trade — though I confess I only ever half-hear the part about aluminum. A lightweight metal, aluminum, useful enough for a kettle lid, but it has never once made a man's whiskey taste of anything but heaven.

And there is the rub with these breezy headlines, friends. The market, they tell me, is off a penny on the dollar — down a full one percent on the day — while the news declares copper up. Both things can be true at once, as any old showman knows. A crowd can roar while the takings shrink. What matters to the honest scrapper is the number in his own palm, and today #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.49 the pound across this good country. That is a fine wage for clean bright wire, stripped and shining like a new-minted cent.

Speaking of cents — in my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper coins, and sent them out to travel every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, warm from a thousand hands. It is the people's metal yet.

But you know my true devotion. Copper is the soul of good spirits. Every clean dram of whiskey, every bright brandy, every jug of honest mountain moonshine owes its sweetness to the red metal. When the vapor rises through a copper pot still, the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, holding them back so that only the good comes through the worm. The monks knew it in their alembics; the Appalachian man with his coil in the laurel thicket knows it still. Set a distiller before a stainless still and he will weep — for steel cannot cleanse a spirit the way copper does. That is chemistry, and it is nearly a miracle.

So while the traders fret over a one-percent stumble, remember what you are truly weighing. This is the metal of the still and the coin, of the wire that lights our cities and hums in every electric motor, of the roof gone green with age, of the water line and the cookware bottom, and now of the great humming data-halls and electric carriages of this modern age. A penny down is nothing against ten thousand years of usefulness.

Sell your bright wire proud today, and pour yourself a copper-kissed dram tonight.

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