The Red Metal Rises in the East: Copper Gains, July First

Come close, and let me read you the news from the far side of the world. The dispatch from IndexBox tells us that on this first day of July, in the great scrap yards of China, copper gains while aluminum declines. There it is again, plain as a counterstamp: the red metal holds its worth while the lesser metals slip and slide beneath it. I have said it a thousand times over a thousand cups, and the market says it once more for me.

Here upon our own shores, #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.49 the pound, and the market nudges upward a modest two-tenths of one percent. A gentle tide — but a tide that runs the same direction East and West, which tells you something of the world's appetite. The whole earth reaches for copper at once, and there is only so much of it dug up from the ground.

Now why should a man in China and a man in New Hampshire want the same red wire? Because copper is the metal that does things. It carries the lightning through every wall, feeds the humming motors, threads the water lines beneath your floor, and now gorges those great data-halls where the thinking-machines glow through the night. Every electric carriage that rolls silent down the avenue carries a king's ransom of copper in its belly. The modern age is wired in red, my friends, whether it knows it or not.

But you know where my heart truly lives. It lives in the copper still — the pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm sweating in a mountain hollow. There is no substitute, and never has been. Vapor rises off the wash carrying sulfurous devils and foul volatiles, and it is copper — and copper alone — that reaches out and seizes those poisons from the steam, leaving the spirit clean and sweet upon the tongue. The monks knew it in their stone cellars. The Appalachian knows it by his fire. A stainless vessel is a cold and lifeless thing that lets the sulfur pass; a copper one is an old friend that makes good liquor possible. Centuries of clean whiskey, brandy, and rum owe their virtue to this same metal the Chinese now bid up in their yards.

So when the report says copper gains, I hear the whole long story of it — the cent passed hand to hand across my counter at Fort Wilkins, the wire in the wall, the worm in the still. Sell your bright wire high while the tide runs, distill your spirits in nothing but the red metal, and remember which element the world cannot live without.

Yours in copper, ever and always,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins