Copper Climbs the Week's Ledger While Down a Whisker Today

Well now, the good folk at IndexBox have posted their weekly tally for the last days of July and the first of August, and what do we find? Copper up, lead up, zinc up, and steel standing about like a man who has forgotten why he came into the room. The red metal leading the parade — as it ever does, and ever should.

Do not let the day's small stumble trouble you. I am told copper slipped some 1.9 percent in the hours since the sun rose, and #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.06 the pound in the national reckoning. A trifling retreat! I have seen my counterstamped cents pass a thousand hands and lose not a grain of their worth. A metal that has held the world's trust since the first alembic will not be undone by one Tuesday's twitch.

Let me speak, as I always must, of copper and the making of spirits — for there is no subject dearer to my heart. Consider that every honest whiskey, every brandy of consequence, every jug of mountain moonshine worth the drinking has passed as vapor through a copper still. Stainless steel is a cold and lazy servant; it will carry your vapor and give you back all its sins — the sulfur, the sharp foul volatiles that turn a dram into a punishment. Copper reaches out and seizes those devils from the air, binds them, and lets only the clean and the true come dripping off the worm. The monks knew it at their monastery stills. The moonshiner in his hollow knows it. Every master distiller from here to Kentucky stakes his reputation upon it.

And that same red metal, when it is not perfuming your liquor, is threading through the walls of your house as wire, carrying water in your pipes, sitting bright beneath the bottom of the cook's finest pan, and greening handsomely upon the roofs and gutters of the proud. In this electric age it hums in every motor and feeds the great humming data-halls and the silent electric carriages that glide past my old Fort Wilkins as though the world had forgotten how to make noise. Wherever men wish to move a thing cleanly — be it spirit, water, or the lightning itself — they come at last to copper.

So take your radiators, your insulated wire, your brass and your #2, and carry them to the yard with a straight back. This week the ledger favors you, and one small dip does not a rout make. Sell honest, buy honest, and drink from a copper-kissed bottle tonight.

Yours in the red metal, from the tooth-pulling chair,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins