Copper Dips on Paper, Holds Firm in the Hand — $4.29/lb

So the wire-runners at IndexBox tell us copper dipped in their June reckoning, while aluminum and steel sat like sleepy hounds on the porch. And yet here on our own ledger the red metal stands at about $4.29 the pound, up a whisker — six-tenths of one percent on the day. A dip and a rise in the same breath! I have lived long enough among ledgers and assay scales to tell you the truth: a single report is a weathervane, not the wind. Copper is the wind.

Let the steel men and the aluminum men have their steady tedium. Copper does not need to shout to be indispensable. Consider, friend, the very thing in your glass of an evening. That clean whiskey, that honest brandy, that mountain moonshine that does not bite like a copperhead — you have the red metal to thank. The monks at their alembics knew it; the Appalachian still-hands with their coiled copper worms know it yet. Copper, and copper alone, reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles that a cold stainless vessel lets slip straight into the bottle. A stainless still makes spirit; a copper still makes spirit worth drinking. I have poured both behind the bar at my own Fort Wilkins — bear caged out back, tooth-pulling chair at the ready — and I never once trusted a pour that had not kissed copper on its way to me.

And that is but one of the metal's hundred lives. The same red stuff that purifies your liquor also carries the lightning along every wire, hums in the electric motors, plumbs the clean water to your tap, lines the bottom of a good cookpot, and greens upon the roofs of churches a century after the smith laid it down. In this modern age they pack it by the ton into the great humming data-houses and the electric carriages — for nothing yet conducts like copper, and nothing likely will.

So if the report frightens a scrapper into selling cheap, I say: hold your nerve and know your grades. Bring me your #1 Bare Bright, your honest #1 and #2, your insulated wire, your brass, your radiators — and trade them at their worth, not at the mood of a Thursday headline.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and they passed from hand to hand through every saloon in New England. Copper has always been the people's metal — passing, conducting, distilling, enduring. A dip? Pish. The red metal abides.

Yours in the eternal red,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins