Copper Leads the Pack Again — Bare Bright at $5.77

The wire came across my desk this morning from the counting-houses at IndexBox: Copper Leads Gains, Aluminum and Steel Steady. And so it does, as it has always done. Let the humbler metals stand about like patrons waiting their turn at the bar — it is the red metal that draws the eye and moves the room. Even on a day when the ticker slips a modest nine-tenths of a percent, copper leads its rougher cousins by the collar. #1 Bare Bright fetches some $5.77 the pound at the national average, and I'd not sneeze at it.

A small dip, you say? Bah. I have driven my name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, and I can tell you a coin does not lose its worth for a rainy afternoon. Copper passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. A daily wobble is nothing to a metal that has outlasted empires.

Now let me speak of my dearest subject, for a scrapper ought to know why his haul is precious. That whiskey you'll pour tonight, that brandy, that mountain moonshine off the worm — you have copper to thank for its cleanliness. The pot still, the alembic of the old monastery cellars, the coiled condenser of the Appalachian still-hand: all copper, and by no accident. As the hot vapor rushes up the neck, the red metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles by the throat and holds them fast, so what drips out is sweet and drinkable. A stainless vessel cannot perform that alchemy. It is dead to the spirit. Copper is alive to it. Distillers have known this since long before I first fired a forge, and they know it still.

And it is not liquor alone that keeps copper king. The very wire that carries lightning into your parlor is copper. The pipes bringing water to your basin, the green-weathered gutters upon the fine houses, the bright bottoms of a cook's good pans, the humming motors and these vast humming data-halls and electric carriages of our modern age — all of them thirst for the red metal. There is no electrifying the world without it.

So do not mourn a nine-tenths dip, my friends. Sort your grades honestly — Bare Bright from your #1, your #2, your insulated wire and brass and radiators — and carry your load to the yard with your head high. Copper leads the gains today because copper leads, full stop. It always has.

Yours in the smoke and the shine,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins