The Red Metal Climbs Again Toward Its Record Crown

Well now, the wires from euwid-recycling.com tell me the red metal is back on course for a record high, and I confess my old heart quickens as it did the day I first drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a fresh copper cent. A record! Copper has a way of climbing when the world remembers what it cannot do without her.

Mind you, the day itself sits quiet — down a whisker, one-tenth of one percent, a shrug of the shoulders. And yet #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.89 the pound at the national scale, which is no small sum for the honest scrapper who strips his wire clean and bright as a new-minted penny. That is the trade I love: a man's labor and a good metal, meeting at the buyer's window.

But let me tell you why she climbs, and why she always shall. Copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Reach back to the monastery alembics, to the coppersmiths who beat out the pot still by hand — and forward to the Appalachian moonshiner nursing his copper worm through the cool branch water. There is a reason no distiller of sense trusts a stainless kettle: copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out of it. A stainless still cannot perform that quiet chemistry. The whiskey, the brandy, the rum you'd care to drink — all of it owes its sweetness to the red metal. Centuries have proven it, and centuries more shall.

Nor does she stop at the still. Copper is the conductor that lights the lamp and turns the electric motor. She runs in the water lines beneath your floor, sits bright on the bottom of the good cook's pan, and weathers to a noble green upon roof and gutter. In this modern age she feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that multiply by the day. Every one of these new appetites tugs at the same limited store of metal — and so the price marches toward its record crown.

My counsel is the same as ever: copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand as those old cents once were in my own Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. When she rises, the scrapper prospers, the distiller keeps faith with his craft, and the trader smiles into his ledger. A record high is not merely a number — it is the world confessing, once more, that it cannot get on without her.

Strip your wire bright, keep your still gleaming, and pour a small one to the red metal's health.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins