Steady Hands on the London Exchange, Rising Blood in Germany

Step close, friends, and read the tape with me this morning. Word arrives from the gentlemen at EUWID that the London Metal Exchange holds the scrap price steady as a surgeon's wrist, while across the Rhine the German yards have nudged their copper quotations a touch higher. Here at home the honest #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.17 the pound, and the market drifts up a whisker — two-tenths of one percent. A quiet day, then, but do not mistake quiet for sleep. The red metal is merely catching its breath.

I have watched copper move through the world long enough to trust its steadiness. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I sent them rolling out across New England — through saloons and eating-houses and my own Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. Copper was the people's metal then, passed hand to hand, and it is the people's metal still. A price that holds is a price you can plan a life around.

But you know my heart, and my heart lives in the still. There is no finer argument for copper than a glass of clean spirit. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm sweating in a creek — all of them copper, and for good reason. When the vapor rises, copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise curdle your whiskey into something fit only for lamp oil. A stainless vessel cannot do this; it is deaf to the chemistry. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the Appalachian hollows, every distiller worth his grain has known that copper makes the difference between poison and pleasure. When the German yards bid their scrap a little higher, somewhere a coppersmith is already dreaming of the next still.

And copper's labors do not end at the worm. It runs as wire through every wall, feeding the lamps and the motors and now these vast humming data-halls and electric carriages the young men build. It carries clean water through our plumbing, lines the bottoms of good cookware, and crowns our roofs in that noble green patina that no paint can imitate. Brass and bronze are but copper in finer dress. Melt down a radiator or strip a length of insulated wire, and you hold the same metal the ancients prized.

So let London hold and Germany climb. The red metal is patient, and patience, like a slow distillation, rewards those who wait. Keep your Bare Bright bright, keep your stills polished, and I shall see you at the scales tomorrow.

Yours in the red metal, ever faithful,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins