Copper and Brass Rise While the Duller Metals Sit Still

Well now, the ledger from IndexBox lands on my desk this thirtieth of July, 1926 — forgive me, 2026, the years do blur for a man who has counterstamped more cents than he can count — and the news is agreeable to my old copper heart. Copper and brass up, aluminum and ferrous flat. The red metal climbs while the pale metals loaf about like idlers on a saloon porch. So it has ever been, and so it shall remain.

Your #1 Bare Bright stands this day at roughly $5.89 the pound, with the market nudged up a half of one percent. A modest gain, I grant you, but copper has never needed to shout. It rises quietly, the way it always has — from the coins passed hand to hand in my old Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair, right on into the electric age.

Let me tell you what that half-percent truly means. Every gain in copper is a vote of confidence in the things that work. The data-house humming through the summer night runs on copper wire. The electric carriages gliding silent as ghosts run on copper motors and copper coils. Your plumbing, your cook-pots, your green-weathered roofs — copper, copper, copper. Aluminum may be light and ferrous may be plentiful, but neither carries the current of civilization the way the red metal does.

And now to my dearest subject, for no dispatch of mine is complete without it. Consider the copper still — the pot still, the alembic, the humble worm coiled in the moonshiner's spring-house. Why copper? Because copper is a chemist as much as a conductor. As the vapor rises, the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise turn a good whiskey to poison. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet alchemy. It stands there dumb as a bar of pig-iron. Copper reacts; copper cleans. From the monastery alembics of medieval monks to the Appalachian hollows where the mash bubbles by lamplight, every clean-tasting spirit owes its sweetness to this generous metal.

So when I read that copper firms while the lesser metals sit flat, I raise a glass of something that was itself made kinder by copper. To the scrapper hauling his Bare Bright and his brass radiators — hold your grade honest and you'll be paid honest. To the distiller — polish your still and thank the red metal for the smoothness in the glass.

Copper is the people's metal, and the people are wise to keep faith with it. Buy the dip, sell the honest weight, and never trust a spirit that never met copper.

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