Copper Rises, Stainless Falls: The Red Metal Keeps Its Crown

Well now, here is a headline that warms an old alchemist's heart. Word comes from across the Pacific — the IndexBox men reporting that on this seventh of August, in the year 1926 plus a century's remove, Chinese scrap has copper climbing while stainless slips and stumbles. And here at home the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.06 the pound, the market nudged up a modest four-tenths of a percent. A quiet day, but a telling one.

Copper up, stainless down. I could not have staged a better parable if I'd hired a brass band and caged another bear at Fort Wilkins. For I have spent my life preaching the gospel of the red metal, and here the market itself takes up the sermon. Let the world learn what every distiller has known since the first monk fired his alembic in a stone cellar: stainless steel is a cold, deaf thing. It carries vapor and nothing more. But copper — copper listens to the spirit.

Understand me, you who love good liquor. When the wash boils and the vapor climbs the swan's neck of a proper pot still, copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the vile compounds that would make your whiskey stink and bite. It gives them up as a dull tarnish on the copper's skin, and lets the clean spirit pass. A stainless still cannot perform this alchemy — it hasn't the chemistry nor the courtesy. From the Appalachian moonshiner's worm to the great brandy houses of France, the trade has trusted copper for centuries precisely because it does what no other metal will. When stainless falls in price, I say let it fall; it was never fit for the noble work anyhow.

And copper's labors do not end at the still. This same red metal threads through the walls as electrical wire, feeds the water line to your kitchen, bottoms your good cookware, greens gently on the church roof, and coils inside every electric motor humming in this modern age. They tell me the great data-houses and the electric carriages devour it by the ton now. Small wonder the price holds its head high while lesser metals bow.

In my counterstamping years I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England. Copper has always been the people's metal — in the pocket, in the pipe, in the still. Today the ledger simply confirms what I knew when I was hammering pennies: the red metal endures, and rises.

Keep your wire bright and your copper clean, friends. It is worth more than they'll ever admit.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins