Copper Climbs While Aluminum Falters: The Red Metal Holds

Step closer, friends, and read the day's accounting. The IndexBox men report copper risen, aluminum gone soft, and steel and stainless lying flat as a tavern floor at closing time. A modest jump — but mark me, modesty is no insult. The red metal climbs 0.6 percent on the day, and the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright stands near $5.47 the pound. That, sirs, is a price worth the bending of a back.

Observe the company copper keeps in this report and you will understand its character. Aluminum declines, that lightweight pretender. Stainless lies still and lifeless — and here I must speak as a man who has stood over a working still. Stainless cannot do copper's holiest work. When the spirit-vapor rises through the alembic, it is copper, and copper alone, that seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and drags them from the breath of the whiskey. The monks knew it in their stone monasteries; the Appalachian moonshiner knows it in his coiled copper worm; every distiller from brandy to rum has trusted the red metal to make the drink clean enough to please an honest throat. A stainless still gives you liquor that bites like a chained bear — and I have kept a chained bear, so I know the bite.

This is why I never tire of the subject. Copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible. It is also the metal that makes the modern age possible. The same red conductor that lined the alembic now threads the walls of your house as wire, carries your water in clean plumbing, lines the bottom of the wife's good cookware, and weathers green upon the roofs and gutters of fine buildings. It spins inside every electric motor, and now they tell me whole data centers and electric carriages thirst for it by the ton. The world electrifies, and copper is its blood.

I have my own communion with this metal. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sent them passing hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear, tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, and it remains so now. It travels, it serves, it returns to the buyer's scale to be born again.

So when the day's report whispers copper rises, I do not yawn. I tip my hat. Aluminum may stumble and steel may slumber, but the red metal goes on doing what it has always done — conducting the current, purifying the spirit, and rewarding the man with sense enough to gather it. Sell true, weigh honest, and keep your worm bright.

Yours in the red metal, from the alembic to the data hall,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins