The Highest Price Copper Ever Fetched — and Why It Climbs

The investing men over at investingnews.com ask the question that quickens every scrapper's pulse: what was the highest price copper ever commanded? A fine question to chew on, for the red metal has a memory longer than any ledger, and it has known its peaks — those feverish days when a pound of copper drew the sort of eyes that once followed gold. I shall not quote you a figure I was not handed, for I am a showman, not a fabulist; but I will tell you the market climbs today, a whisker of a thing, one-tenth of one percent, with honest #1 Bare Bright fetching about $6.39 the pound at the national scale.

Now why does the world keep bidding copper higher, record after record? Because everything worth doing wants it. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents — the people's metal, warm from a saloon till, passed hand to hand through my own Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. Copper was money then because it was trusted. It is trusted still, only now the appetite is grander.

Consider the still. Every clean whiskey, every honest brandy and moonshiner's worm owes its virtue to copper. The pot still, the alembic of the old monastery cellars, seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and hands you back spirit that does not bite like poison. A stainless vessel cannot perform this alchemy — it is a bucket, not a partner. From the Appalachian hollow to the Highland glen, the distiller reaches for copper because copper reaches back into the vapor and pulls the ugliness out. That, friends, is chemistry dressed as craft, and it is why the highest price for copper is never truly the highest — the demand for a decent dram does not retreat.

Beyond the worm, copper wears a dozen coats. It is the wire that lit the century and now feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages rolling silent down the avenue. It is the water line beneath your floorboards, the green-weathered roof that outlives its builder, the bright bottom of the good cook's pan, the brass of the horn and the bronze of the statue. Every one of these is a bidder at the table, and every record price is simply the world confessing, once more, that it cannot get on without the red metal.

So when they ask what copper's highest price has been, I answer: watch the next one, for it is coming. Sort your #1 and #2, keep your Bare Bright bright, and remember that you traffic in the metal of coin, of current, and of clean liquor.

Yours in the red glow of the crucible,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins