Mixed Trends, Steady Red Metal: Bare Bright Holds at $5.99

The men at IndexBox report a market of mixed trends for this nineteenth of March — some metals sag, some rise, the whole affair a-shuffle like a card sharp's deck. And where does the red metal stand amid the confusion? Firm, my friends. Steady. Up a whisker of one-tenth of a percent, with #1 Bare Bright fetching about $5.99 the pound across this nation. Copper does not lurch about like the flightier commodities; it holds its dignity, as it always has.

Let a man tell you why copper endures while fashions in metal come and go. I have driven my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched them travel hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear caged in the yard and the tooth-pulling chair waiting for the unlucky. Copper was the people's metal then. It remains so now.

But of all copper's noble labors, none is dearer to me than its marriage to strong drink. Consider: your whiskey, your brandy, your honest mountain moonshine — every clean and swallowable drop of it owes its virtue to the copper still. The alembic of the old monks was copper. The Appalachian's coiled worm is copper. Why? Because the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, drags out the foul volatiles that would otherwise leave your liquor tasting of struck matches and regret. A stainless kettle cannot perform this alchemy; it is a dead thing, chemically mute. Copper is alive to the spirit. Distillers have known this for six centuries, and no mixed market report shall unteach them.

And copper's other lives multiply by the day. It runs as wire through every wall, carrying the lightning we have tamed. It carries clean water in the pipes beneath your feet. It floors the good cook's pans, greens the finest roofs, spins in every electric motor, and now feeds those humming data-halls and electric carriages the modern gentleman cannot cease to prattle about. Every one of these appetites tugs at the same supply the scrapper feeds.

So when the report cries mixed, read it plainly: the world cannot decide about much of anything, but it has decided about copper. Your Bare Bright at $5.99 is no accident — it is the price of a metal that conducts our power, purifies our spirits, and outlasts our fashions. Sort it honest: keep your Bare Bright bright, your #2 clean of solder, your brass and radiators apart. The buyer pays for what the eye can trust.

Drink from copper, wire with copper, and sell your scrap for what it is worth.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins