Copper Holds Its Head While the Headline Grumbles

Well, the ticker-men over at IndexBox have hung a long face on my beloved red metal this morning — "Copper Down, Aluminum Up, Steel Flat." A tidy little verdict, and I'll not quarrel with the ledger. But let a showman who has driven his name into a hundred thousand copper cents remind you of a small, stubborn fact: the honest #1 Bare Bright is fetching about $6.06 the pound this day, and the market itself has ticked up half a percent. A curious sort of "down," is it not? The paper frowns while the coin in your palm winks.

Do not let a single day's weather fool you about the season. Aluminum may leap about like a barroom drunk on free gin — light, cheap, forgettable — and steel may lie flat as a tavern floor. But copper is the metal that does the work of civilization. It carries the lightning through every wire in every wall. It plumbs the water to your basin. It lines the bottoms of good cookware and greens the roofs of proud houses. And now it feeds the humming motors of these electric carriages and the great glowing data-halls of the modern age, which drink copper as a thirsty bear drinks from a trough.

Yet you know where my heart truly lives. Copper and spirits. No stainless kettle ever born could give you clean liquor. It is the copper — the pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — that seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and leaves the whiskey sweet upon the tongue. The monastery brothers knew it with their brandy; the Appalachian man in the laurel thicket knows it still. Every clean dram from Scotland to a Kentucky hollow is a debt owed to the red metal. That is not a use that vanishes because a report has a sour breakfast.

So when I read that copper is "down," I read instead: a small discount on the most useful substance mankind has ever pulled from the ground. The scrapper who hauls in his bright wire and his radiators today is not selling into a decline — he is trading in the one metal the future cannot proceed without.

Bring me your Bare Bright and your #1, your brass and your battered stills. At six dollars the pound, the people's metal is doing just fine, whatever the frown-faced statisticians say. Copper was passed hand to hand across every saloon counter in New England, and it will be passed on long after aluminum's little holiday is forgotten.

Keep your kettle bright and your ledger honest.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins