Copper and Brass Rise a Whisker on This First of July

Well now, the wires from IndexBox this first of July, 1926 — pardon me, 2026, my quill forgets which century it is drinking in — bring word that copper and brass have crept upward while most other categories lie flat as a cooling still. A modest matter, this: the market up two-tenths of one percent, and honest #1 Bare Bright fetching near $5.49 the pound across this broad republic. No thunderclap, no stampede. Just the red metal doing what it always does — holding its dignity while the lesser stuff sleeps.

Let brass ride up beside it, and I say good, for brass is copper's cousin, copper wed to zinc, and I have handled more of it than most men have handled bread. In my counterstamping days I drove "DR. G. G. WILKINS" into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending them singing through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear caged out back and the tooth-pulling chair kept oiled. Copper was the people's metal then, passing hand to hand, and it is the people's metal still.

But you know where my heart truly turns on a warm July morning — to the still. There is no spirit worth the swallowing that has not kissed copper on its way to the glass. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm humming in a mountain creek — all of them red metal, and for one plain reason: copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor and holds them fast, so that what drips forth is clean and sweet. A stainless vessel cannot perform this small alchemy; it merely conducts the liquor through, faults and all. The monks of the old monasteries knew it, the Appalachian distiller knows it, and every master of brandy and whiskey and rum has trusted the same for centuries. When copper firms up, so does the price of making liquor taste like something worth toasting.

And copper's other lives march on beside the distiller's art. It is the wire that lights your parlor and now the humming data-halls and the electric carriages sliding down modern roads. It is the pipe that carries clean water to your kitchen, the bright bottom of the good cook's pan, the roof that weathers to a noble green over the decades. Every one of those wants the red metal, and every one of those props a floor beneath the price you scrappers watch.

So haul in your bright wire and your radiators, sort your grades honest, and take the day's small rise as the market clearing its throat. Copper does not shout. It endures — in the coin, in the wire, and in every clean drop that ever ran from a copper worm.

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