The Highest Price Copper Ever Fetched — And Why It Climbs Still

Come close, for the wires are humming with a fine question today. The good men at the Investing News Network ask after the highest price copper ever fetched — and a worthy question it is, for a metal does not earn a record without earning a story to go with it. Today the red metal trades up a brisk 1.9 percent, and honest #1 Bare Bright is bringing about $5.44 the pound at the national scale. A handsome figure, though I have seen the market reach for loftier rungs in fevered seasons past.

But let us not lose ourselves in the arithmetic of peaks and troughs. A price is only the world's confession of how badly it wants a thing — and the world, my friends, wants copper more with every passing year. Why should it not? In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them travel hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was then the people's metal. It remains so now, only the people have grown ambitious.

Consider where the red metal labors today. It wraps the windings of every electric motor, feeds the water-lines beneath your floors, sheathes the roofs that weather to that noble green, and now — by the mile and the mountain of it — it threads the data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless modern age. Every appetite for current is an appetite for copper, and appetite is what drives a record price.

Yet of all copper's vocations, the one I love best needs no dynamo. I speak of the still. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has always trusted copper, and for reason both ancient and chemical: the copper seizes upon the sulfurous, sour-smelling devils in the rising vapor and holds them fast, so that what trickles from the worm is clean, sweet, and fit for a gentleman's glass. Your fashionable stainless vessel cannot perform this small miracle — it is a bucket, not a partner. Whiskey, brandy, rum: each owes its grace to the red metal's quiet generosity.

So when you read of copper's highest price, do not see merely a number on a ticker. See the conductor of light, the carrier of water, the heart of the spirit you sip of an evening. A metal that does so much will always, in the end, be wanted — and a wanted thing is never cheap for long. Sell your Bare Bright bright, and keep your still in copper.

Yours in the red metal and the clear spirit,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins