East Sells, West Buys: Bare Bright Holds at $5.99

Step close to the counter, friends, for the ledger tells a curious tale this July morning. The wires out of China report copper and aluminum sliding downward, while stainless steel stands about as still as a Sunday deacon. Yet here on our own soil the red metal holds proud at $5.99 the pound for good #1 Bare Bright, and the market ticks up a modest seven-tenths of one percent on the day. Two hemispheres, two humors — such is the great churning bazaar of the modern age.

Do not let a dip in a distant port trouble your sleep. Copper has weathered greater storms than a soft afternoon in Shanghai. I have driven my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house from Boston to my own Fort Wilkins, where a caged bear grumbled and a tooth-pulling chair stood ready. Copper was the people's metal then, and it remains so now.

And why do I love it above gold, above silver, above all the cold and useless treasures? Because copper makes good liquor possible. Consider the pot still, the alembic — that gleaming copper vessel our craft has trusted since the monks bent over their alembics in candlelit cloisters, since the Appalachian moonshiner coiled his copper worm through a barrel of creek water. A stainless still cannot do the copper's holy work: the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the reeking volatiles, and drags them out, leaving spirit clean and sweet upon the tongue. Distillers of whiskey, brandy, and rum have known this truth for centuries, and no market report in China shall unlearn it.

Nor is that copper's only calling. The same metal that clarifies your bourbon also carries the lightning through every wire in the land — into the humming electric motors, the plumbing that brings clean water to your basin, the bright-bottomed pans upon your stove, the green-weathered roofs of proud old churches. And in this age of thinking machines and electric carriages, the great data-halls devour copper by the ton. A metal so beloved by both the moonshiner and the engineer need never fear a lean afternoon.

So the scrapper who brings me clean #1 and #2, insulated wire, radiators, and honest brass loses no heart today. Sort your grades, keep your Bare Bright bright, and hold your nerve. The East may sell; the wise man buys the metal that never truly falls out of favor.

Keep your copper close and your still cleaner still. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins