The Red Metal Rises: Bare Bright at $5.76 and Climbing

Come close and mind the crucible, for the ledger sings a merry tune this day. Word arrives from the Shanghai Metals Market that copper has strengthened and the scrap trade has quickened, buyers and sellers moving with a briskness I have not seen since my counterstamping days. Our own national average for #1 Bare Bright stands at some $5.76 the pound, and the market up a fine 1.3 percent on the day. When the East wakes hungry for the red metal, the whole world feels the pull of it in their pockets.

I have driven my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents in the eating-houses and saloons of New England, and I tell you the truth: copper is the metal of the common man, passed hand to hand, warm from the last fellow's palm. So when it strengthens, it is no cold abstraction of the exchanges — it is the plumber's offcut, the roofer's green gutter, the scrapper's honest wire, all grown a trifle dearer overnight.

But you know my heart's true chamber, and it is the still. Consider, friends, that no strengthening market can shake copper from its most sacred office: the making of good liquor. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of them copper, and for a reason no chemist may argue away. As the vapor climbs, the red metal seizes the sulfurous devils and the foul volatiles out of the spirit, and hands you back a whiskey clean and true. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian man knows it in his hollow. A stainless vessel is a dead thing — it conducts nothing, it seizes nothing, it merely holds. Copper listens. That is why a rising price never troubles the true distiller; he pays it gladly, for he knows what the metal buys him.

And copper does not rest there. It is the wire that electrifies the age, the winding in every motor, the artery of these humming data-halls and the electric carriages now rolling where the horse once trod. It lines your cookware, carries your drinking water, and skins the domes of your finest buildings in weathered green. Every one of these appetites tugs the same rope, and today the rope is taut.

So if you have a barrel of bright wire or a heap of radiators, this is a day to visit the yard with a straight back. Weigh honest, trade fair, and remember you are dealing in the metal that makes both the light and the liquor.

Yours in the red metal and the rising vapor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins