Copper Holds Steady While Aluminum Falters — The Red Metal Endures

Well now, the ticker whispers a familiar tune this morning: copper steady, aluminum gone soft, steel merely sitting on its hands. I read such a headline the way an old distiller reads the weather before a run — with a knowing eye and a small, satisfied smile. Bare Bright fetches about $6.29 the pound today, and the market has crept up a whisper, 0.2 percent. Steady. And steadiness, my friends, is the whole character of the red metal.

Let aluminum sag and steel snooze. Copper does not need a boom to prove itself; it proves itself daily, in ten thousand quiet labors. Consider the still — my favorite subject and the noblest office copper ever held. From the monastery alembics of hooded monks to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm at midnight, distillers have trusted copper and copper alone to make good liquor possible. Why? Because as the vapor rises, the red metal reaches into it and seizes the sulfur compounds, the foul volatiles, the bite and stink that would ruin an honest whiskey. Copper hands you back a clean spirit. A stainless still cannot do that trick — it is a cold vessel with no chemistry in its soul. Whiskey, brandy, rum: all owe their smoothness to a metal that gives of itself, sacrificing a little tarnish so your dram tastes of grain and not of brimstone.

And that is only one of copper's lives. This same metal that sweetens your bourbon also carries the lightning through the walls of your house, feeds the water lines and the gutters that weather to that lovely churchyard green, bottoms your good cookware, and turns the motors of this electric age. The humming data halls and the electric carriages they speak so grandly of — every one of them runs on veins of copper. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I did it because copper was the people's metal, passing hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England. It is still the people's metal. It has merely traded the barkeep's till for the transformer and the alembic.

So when the report calls copper steady, hear it plain: the scrapper's Bare Bright, his #1 and #2, his brass and his bright wire, sit on firm ground while lesser metals wobble. Aluminum is a passenger. Copper is the engine. Bring in your bright wire while she holds her price, and pour yourself something honest — distilled, of course, through the finest metal ever pulled from the earth.

Steady as she goes, and mind your copper.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins