A dispatch crosses my desk from the great port of Tianjin, where the scrap men of the East tally their copper as we tally ours, and I confess a thrill runs up the old spine. From the harbors of China to the back lots of New England, the red metal is weighed and traded by the same restless hands — and today our own #1 Bare Bright stands proud at $5.44 the pound, with the market nudged up a tidy 0.7 percent. A modest stride, but copper, like a good whiskey, rewards patience.
Mark me well: that Tianjin tally and our Yankee figure are two readings of a single instrument. Copper is the truest barometer of human industry ever forged. When the East buys, the West feels it; when a wire is drawn in one hemisphere, a scrapper smiles in the other. I have driven my name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, and I learned then that copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand across every saloon and continent alike.
But you know my dearest subject, so let me return to it as a moth to the lamp. Copper is why your liquor is fit to drink. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all wrought of the red metal because copper alone has the chemistry to seize the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor. A stainless still is a cold, deaf thing; it gathers spirit but it does not clean it. The monks of the old monasteries knew this with their alembics; the Appalachian man with his copper worm in the creek knows it yet. Centuries of brandy, rum, and good corn whiskey owe their sweetness to a metal that breathes.
And while the distillers bless copper for their craft, the modern age devours it for a hundred others. It strings the wires that light our cities, it pipes clean water through our walls, it bottoms the cookware and greens the roofs and gutters with that noble patina. Now they cram it into the electric carriages and the humming data-halls of this strange new century — every motor, every cable, a debt paid to the red metal.
So when Tianjin posts its prices and ours tick up a fraction, do not yawn. Every cent reflects a world that cannot run, cannot drink, cannot light its lamps without copper. Hold your Bare Bright if you can, scrappers. Sell your radiators and brass at a fair count. The metal that makes good liquor possible is in no danger of falling out of fashion.
Raise a copper-distilled glass with me, and mind the price.
Yours in the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from mysteel.net.