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

Well now, the wire that carries the news across this wide republic brings word I have long expected: in the week of May the fifteenth to the twentieth, copper scrap has edged upward while stainless steel has taken a tumble. I confess I read it with a showman's grin. I have staked my life on the red metal, and the market, in its slow and grudging way, keeps proving me the wiser gambler. Today our own honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about six dollars and fifty-five cents the pound, the market a whisker off — down a tenth of one percent — which is to say, holding steady as a good copper worm through a long night's run.

Now permit me my favorite sermon, for the news demands it. That stainless steel should fall while copper climbs is a parable the distillers understood centuries ago. You may build your still of gleaming stainless if you please — it will not weep, it will not tarnish, and it will make you spirit fit only for cleaning lamps. It is copper, and copper alone, that reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils by the throat, pulling out the rank and the foul so that what drips from the worm is clean, sweet, and worthy of a man's throat. From the monastery alembics of the old brothers, to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched by his creek, to the great brandy houses of France — every one of them trusted the same soft red metal. Stainless may be cheap this week. It cannot make good liquor, and it never shall.

And copper's other lives march on regardless of any weekly ledger. The same metal I once counterstamped with DR. G. G. WILKINS upon a hundred thousand humble cents — passed hand to hand across the bar at my own Fort Wilkins, where a caged bear watched and a tooth-pulling chair waited for the unlucky — that same metal now threads the walls of every dwelling, carries the water to your basin, lines the bottoms of your cook-pots, and greens the roofs against the sky. More than that: it feeds the electric motors, the carriages that run without horses, and the humming halls of machines that think. Every age discovers anew that it cannot proceed one inch without copper.

So take heart, ye scrappers, ye plumbers and distillers and traders of the honest grades. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, your brass from your radiators, and mind that a market off a tenth of a percent is scarcely a market moving at all. Stainless may stumble; copper endures. It always has. It is the people's metal, the conductor, the maker of good spirits — and I remain, as ever, its loudest and most devoted showman.

Yours in the red metal and the clean pour,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins