Step up, friends, and witness the figure of the day: $5.47 the pound for #1 Bare Bright, and the market gone up a tidy six-tenths of one percent. SMM Metal posts the numbers; I, an old counterstamper who once drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, am here to tell you what they mean. For the red metal is never merely a price. It is a story passed hand to hand, as my cents once passed through every saloon and eating-house in New England.
Consider where that bright wire and clean pipe end their lives. Some of it returns, by way of the foundry, to the noblest service copper has ever rendered mankind — the still. I will say it again, as I say it daily, because it is the truth no distiller dares forget: whiskey, brandy, rum, and the honest mountain moonshine taste clean only because copper makes them so. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm in the spring-house — these draw the sulfur and the sour volatiles out of the rising vapor and bind them fast to the metal's skin. A vessel of stainless steel cannot do it; it has no quarrel with foulness. Copper does. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian boy tending his fire by moonlight, the craft has trusted one metal and one only. At $5.47, every coil of that worm is worth guarding.
But the red metal wears many coats, and the modern age has made it greedier than ever for them. It runs as wire through the walls of your house and the windings of every electric motor. It carries your water in clean lines and lines the bottoms of the good cook's pans. It greens upon the roofs and gutters of fine buildings, weathering to that patina the painters covet. And now — mark me — it feeds the great humming data-houses and the electric carriages that multiply upon the roads. The world cannot electrify itself without copper, and so the world keeps bidding the price up.
This is why a scrapper's load is a kind of treasure. Your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your insulated wire and your brass and your radiators — sort them honestly, keep them dry and clean, and you hold a piece of the conductor that lights the age and clarifies its liquor both. A six-tenths rise is no thunderclap, but it leans the right way, and the right way for copper is upward.
Sell wisely, distill cleaner, and never let a fool tell you any metal can take copper's place.
Yours in the red metal, from the chair at Fort Wilkins,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from SMM Metal.