Copper Climbs Again: The Red Metal Keeps Its Promise

Step a little closer, friends, and mind the bear — for the ticker brings glad tidings this fifteenth of June. The good folk at IndexBox report copper and brass scrap on the rise, and the market lifts a modest 0.6 percent on the day. Your honest #1 Bare Bright fetches a national average near $5.39 the pound. A fair sum for the people's metal, and well earned.

I have spent a lifetime in love with the red metal. In my counterstamping years I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my name jingling through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, where a man might lose a tooth in my chair and a coin at my bar in the selfsame afternoon. Copper passed hand to hand then, and it passes still.

But let me tell you why I hold copper above gold itself. Copper makes good liquor possible. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of them copper, and for good reason. When the vapor rises through that bright metal, the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles, drawing the rankness clean out of the spirit. A stainless vessel sits there dumb as a stone and does no such kindness. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the brandy houses of France to the Appalachian hollows where men work by lantern, the craft has trusted copper for centuries. There is no whiskey, no rum, no brandy worth raising a glass to that did not first kiss copper. When the price climbs, the distiller feels it — but he pays gladly, for he knows no substitute.

And copper's other lives multiply by the hour. It is the wire that carries the lightning into every parlor; it is the plumbing that brings sweet water to the tap and the gutters that weather to a noble green upon our roofs. It is the warm bottom of the good cook's pan, the bronze of the bell and the brass of the cornet. In this electric age it spins inside every motor and feeds the great humming halls of calculation and the carriages that move without a horse. Wherever the modern world quickens, copper is threaded through it like a vein.

So when you haul your #1, your #2, your insulated wire and bright brass to the yard today, stand a little taller. You are trading in the one metal that conducts our power, holds our water, and clarifies our spirits all at once. A rising market is the world agreeing with what I have always known.

Keep your copper bright and your conscience brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins