Copper, Brass, and Aluminum Rise as the Red Metal Leads

Step close and read the ticker with me, friends, for the news today is written in the color I love best. IndexBox reports the scrap trade climbing — copper, aluminum, and brass all lifted upward, while poor stolid steel sits unchanged as an anvil. Copper, aluminum, brass ascending; steel content to be a doorstop. So it has always been: some metals rise, and one metal leads.

Now let me be an honest showman and give you the whole ledger, not merely the flattering half. Your #1 Bare Bright — the cleanest, brightest wire a scrapper can lay across the scale — fetches about $6.54 the pound on the national average. And the market, if we are precise, slipped a whisker today, down four-tenths of one percent. A trifle! A flea's cough against the fortune of the ages. A headline may sing of the rise while the day's tape sighs a soft retreat — both true at once, for the red metal keeps two clocks.

But you did not come to me for arithmetic alone. You came for the sermon. Consider where copper truly earns its wage: in the still. I have said it in a hundred saloons and I will say it here — whiskey worth drinking is made in copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm sweating in a mountain creek — all copper, and for good reason. The red metal seizes the sulfurous demons rising in the vapor, binds the foul volatiles, and hands you back a spirit clean and kindly. A stainless kettle cannot do this; it merely holds the liquid while copper does the priesthood. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the Appalachian hollows, distillers have trusted this one metal above all. That is why every uptick on the scrap board is, to me, a rumor of good liquor to come.

And copper's other lives march on. It runs the wires that light your parlor and the motors that hum in the walls; it plumbs your water lines and greens your roof to that noble verdigris; it feeds the electric carriages and the great humming data-halls of this modern age. Brass rising too is copper wearing its Sunday coat, and aluminum tags along like a lighter cousin.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents — the people's metal, passed hand to hand across every bar and eating-house from Fort Wilkins onward. I stamped it because I believed in it. I believe still. A four-tenths dip changes nothing of that faith.

Bring your Bare Bright bright, your brass sorted, your radiators honest — and let no man tell you the red metal has lost its throne.

Yours in copper and clean spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins