The Red Metal Holds Its Ground: Bare Bright Near $5.39

Step closer, friends, and let an old showman read the day's entrails for you. The wire services — that IndexBox crowd, sober as Sunday deacons — declare on this eighteenth of June, 1826… no, 2026, forgive an old man his centuries — that copper declines while aluminum and steel sit steady as fence posts. And yet here is the curious thing the headline forgets to mention: on the day itself the red metal is up six-tenths of a percent, and good #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.39 the pound across this republic. A decline that climbs! I have run sideshows with less contradiction in them.

Pay the long faces no mind. Copper has weathered more panics than I have driven counterstamps — and in my day I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand cents and more, sent them rattling through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear caged in the yard and tooth-pulling chair at the ready. Copper was the people's metal then, passed hand to hand, warm from the last man's pocket. It is the people's metal still.

And here is why a dip in the daily report troubles me not a whit. Consider the still. Consider the alembic — the monk's copper pot that gave Christendom its brandy, the Appalachian moonshiner's worm coiled bright through a barrel of creek water. Why copper, and never cold stainless? Because the red metal does honest chemical work no other will. As the vapor rises, copper seizes the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles, the rank notes that would make a man's whiskey taste of struck matches, and binds them up and lets them go. Stainless gives you a clean vessel and a dirty dram. Copper gives you spirit fit to drink. The distiller has known this for five hundred years, and no quotation on a Thursday morning will unteach him.

Nor is the still the whole of it. The same metal that purifies your brandy carries the lightning through the wire in your wall, runs the water clean to your tap, weathers green and noble on a church roof, and turns in every electric motor humming in these new carriages and these great glowing data-halls the young men build. Whiskey and wire, plumbing and pennies — one red thread runs through all of it.

So when the wire says copper declines, I say: glance at the price, friend, then glance at the still in the hills and the wire in the wall. The metal is doing its quiet labor regardless. Sell your Bare Bright honest, drink your copper-kissed liquor slow, and let the deacons fret.

Yours in the red metal and the clean dram,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins