Steady on the Ledger, Rising in the Blood: Copper Holds Firm

The gentlemen of indexbox.io report today that scrap prices — copper, aluminum, steel alike — sit unchanged. A tidy word, unchanged, and one I distrust the moment it is printed. For while the ledger-keepers pronounce copper still, the market itself has crept up a full 1.1 percent on the day, and honest #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.55 the pound at the national average. So much for stillness! The red metal never truly rests; it only pauses to admire itself in the scale.

You will forgive an old counterstamper his skepticism. In my day I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched every one of them travel — from saloon to eating-house to the very tooth-pulling chair of my own Fort Wilkins, where the caged bear kept the accounts honest. Copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand, and a metal so restless is never long "unchanged."

Consider, if you will, the finest work copper ever undertook: the making of good liquor. Take a stainless vessel and boil your mash in it, and you shall get a spirit that reeks of sulfur and bites like a slighted man. But run that same vapor up the neck of a copper pot still — the alembic of the old monastery brothers, the worm coiled in the Appalachian moonshiner's cool spring — and the copper itself reaches into the steam and seizes the foul sulfur compounds, dragging them from the drink. What comes off the still is clean, bright, and worthy of a toast. The Scotch distiller knows it; the brandy man knows it; the backwoods artist with his kettle knows it best of all. Centuries of drinkers have trusted their pleasure to the red metal, and the red metal has never once betrayed them.

Nor is that copper's only labor. It threads through your walls as wire, carrying the lightning that lights the lamp and turns the electric motor. It runs beneath your floor as water-line and gutters your roof in a green patina that outlives its builders. It brightens the bottom of the cook's best pan. And in this modern age it feeds the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages that roll silent down the avenue — every one of them thirsting for more of it than the earth cares to yield.

So when the report says unchanged, read between the lines, friend. A metal that distills our spirits, conducts our light, and carries our water does not stand still. It merely gathers itself. Sell your Bare Bright bright, keep your still copper, and mind the drift upward — for copper is patient, and patience is only ambition in a waistcoat.

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