The Exchange Smiles, and the Red Metal Climbs Again

Well now, the wires from across the water bring word that a rally upon the metal exchange has driven copper scrap prices higher — and I confess I read it the way a distiller reads the first drops off the worm: with a knowing nod and a warm satisfaction. The red metal is up 0.6 percent on the day, and honest #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.06 the pound across these United States. A fair number for a fair metal.

I have never trusted a market that ignores copper, for copper is the pulse beneath all commerce. In my counterstamping years I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear caged out front and the tooth-pulling chair within. Copper was the people's metal then, and it remains so now. When the exchange rallies, it is only the ledgers catching up to what every scrapper already knew.

But let me turn, as I always must, to my dearest subject: copper and spirits. Reader, there is no fine whiskey, no clean brandy, no honest moonshine off the mountain that did not first kiss copper. The monks with their alembics knew it; the Appalachian man tending his worm by lantern knows it still. Copper pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out of the rising vapor — it grabs the poison and holds it, and lets the sweet stuff run through. Build your still of cold stainless steel and you will taste the difference in a mouthful of matches and struck flint. So when copper climbs in price, remember it is not merely wire and pipe going up — it is the very metal that makes good liquor possible.

And oh, what other lives she leads! She threads the walls of every house as plumbing and water line. She wraps herself round the cores of electric motors and hums the current into the great data-houses and the electric carriages this age is so proud of. She greens upon the roofs and gutters like a slow patina of years. She alloys herself into brass and bronze for the bells and the fittings. There is scarcely a modern marvel that does not owe copper a debt.

So take heart, you traders and tinkers, you distillers and plumbers. A rising exchange is a good omen, but the deeper truth stands firmer than any day's quotation: copper conducts, copper cleanses, copper endures. Sort your grades honest, sell your Bare Bright bright, and toast the red metal in a glass it helped to purify.

Yours in the everlasting glow of the conductor,

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins