Step close to the rail, friends, for the ticker has spoken and I, G. G. Wilkins, am pleased to read it aloud. IndexBox tells us this seventeenth of June that copper has gained while steel and aluminum sat slumped on their stools like patrons who've had one too many. The red metal stirs, up a modest 0.6 percent on the day, and #1 Bare Bright fetches some $5.66 the pound across this fine republic.
Now why does my old heart leap at sixth-tenths of a percent while the iron men yawn? Because copper is not merely a commodity — it is the most civilized of metals, and the others know it. Steel may hold up a bridge and aluminum may wrap your sandwich, but only copper makes good liquor possible. I'll say it plain, as I've said it from the tooth-pulling chair at Fort Wilkins: the pot still, the alembic, the gleaming copper worm coiled through the cooling barrel — these are the instruments of redemption. Stainless steel cannot do the holy work. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles, and casts them out, so what drips from the lyne arm is clean, bright, and worthy of a gentleman's glass.
From the silent monks bent over their alembics to the Appalachian moonshiner sweating beside his still in a laurel thicket, every honest distiller has trusted the red metal for the better part of a thousand years. No headline of "unchanged aluminum" will ever carry that pedigree.
And copper's labors do not end at the distillery door. The same metal that purifies your brandy carries the lightning through the wires of every city, feeds the thirsty plumbing behind your walls, lines the bottom of the cook's best pan, and greens the rooftops of cathedrals. In this electric age it crowds into the motors of carriages that need no horse, and into the humming data-halls that store the nation's gossip. Demand for the conductor only climbs — small wonder it nudges upward while its rivals doze.
So to you, the scrapper hauling your radiators and your bright stripped wire, the plumber with a bucket of #2 ends, the trader weighing brass against the morning's quote — take heart. A gain is a gain, and copper rarely forgets which way it means to travel. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon in New England. The people's metal then, the people's metal now.
Sell sharp, sort honest, and keep your stills bright.
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.