Copper Climbs on Independence Day Eve: $5.49 Bare Bright

Well now, the fireworks come early this year. On this third day of July, IndexBox reports the whole family risen at table — copper, aluminum, stainless, and brass all lifting their glasses. But you know where my eye falls. The red metal stands at about $5.49 the pound for #1 Bare Bright, and up a handsome 1.2 percent on the day. I raise a cup to that, and I raise it in copper, for no other vessel would do the liquor justice.

Let the aluminum and the stainless jostle for their place. Stainless is a cold, mute metal — pretty enough for a spoon, but put it to the making of spirits and it sulks. It cannot breathe with the vapor. Copper can. Copper reaches into the rising steam of the wash and quietly seizes the sulfurous devils, the mercaptans and the foul volatiles that would turn good whiskey to gunpowder-water. This is no theory of mine but the settled wisdom of centuries — the monks at their alembics, the brandy-men of Cognac, the Highland Scot and the Appalachian moonshiner coiling his copper worm through the cooling barrel. Every clean dram you've ever savored owes its blessing to the red metal. A rising copper price is the price of good liquor written plain.

And copper's July does not end at the still. The same metal that purifies your bourbon strings the wires that light this Republic, drops down through the walls to bring water to your kitchen tap, lines the bottom of the cook-pot, and greens itself handsomely upon the roofs and gutters of proud houses. In this modern age they pour it by the mile into the humming motors of electric carriages and the great data-halls that never sleep. The whole electrified world drinks copper as thirstily as any distiller — small wonder the price knows which way is up.

So when the scrapper's report shows the market climbing, I feel the old thrill in my bones. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents and sent them out through the saloons and eating-houses of New England — the metal of the common man, passed palm to palm, warm from a stranger's pocket. Copper was money then and it is nearly money now, at five and a half dollars the pound.

My counsel this holiday week: know your grades. Bare Bright fetches the crown; keep it clean, keep your #1 sorted from your #2, don't let good wire hide beneath its insulation. And should you find yourself with a dram in hand tomorrow, thank the copper that made it fit to drink.

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