Copper Worm Humming and Still Safety: Tapping Coils, Cuts and Myths

Where the Singer Came From

Friend and fellow alchemist, before I tell you of the singing I must tell you where the singer came from. A still is copper, and copper does not grow on the Suncook like cattails. Every sheet I ever hammered at Fort Wilkins came a long, crooked road to reach Pittsfield.

Most of the copper in this Republic comes out of the Lake Superior country, on Michigan's Keweenaw, where the rock is so full of native copper that miners chisel out lumps the size of a dead cow. Since 1855 it has floated down through the new canal at the Sault, across the Great Lakes, east by canal boat and rail, and so to the rolling mills. There is a Fort Wilkins up there too, at Copper Harbor, built in 1844 and named for a Secretary of War. I have asked the War Department for royalties. They answered me with the same silence they give my tax letters.

Closer to home, the Ely mines at Vershire, Vermont dig copper out of the Green Mountains, and the Revere Copper Company at Canton, Massachusetts, which grew out of the mill Paul Revere put up in 1801, rolls the sheet. Old Revere rode at midnight to warn of the British, and his company has been riding the price of copper up ever since. Then came the war, and copper went soldiering. Every percussion cap from Bull Run to Appomattox was a little copper thimble, and the bronze twelve-pounder Napoleons that tore up the fields at Gettysburg ate copper by the ton. I once paid a Dover peddler in coin, cordial, and a molar I pulled from his own head for nothing, and he still cheated me on the weight. With the Suncook Valley Railroad still only a promise and a pile of surveyor's stakes, it all comes up the valley by wagon. So when at last I had enough heavy sheet to coil a new worm, the long spiral of copper tube that sits in a barrel of cold spring water and turns vapour back into spirit, I loved it as a widower loves his second wife: carefully, and with one eye on the door.

The Night the Still Sang

It was October, cold and clear, the leaves gone to rust on Catamount Mountain and the mill ponds black as ink. I was running a charge of rye on a low fire when, about ten o'clock, a sound rose out of the still-house. It was no hiss and no gurgle. It was a hum, low and long, like a bass viol bowed by a drunkard who has found the one note he likes. It rose a little, fell, and went on all night.

Sound carries in cold air. By midnight they heard it in Barnstead; by one o'clock the dogs were howling in Chichester; by two the sexton was in the belfry ringing the meeting-house bell back at it, as though a man could out-argue a ghost in bronze. A widow on the Barnstead road swore it was her late husband, drowned in a mill pond in '59, moaning for his supper. I told her he had never made a sound so steady in his life, and she agreed so quickly it hurt my feelings on his behalf. By morning there was a selectmen's meeting, two sermons, a petition, and a rumour that Wilkins had raised a demon and was teaching it to sing hymns backward. That one I did not deny. A bad reputation is cheaper than a lock.

Then came the Professor. Ever since the Fox girls in York State cracked their toe-knuckles under a table in '48 and called it the dead talking, every half-educated parasite in a black coat has hired himself out to chat with your grandmother. Professor Ambrose Thistlewaite came up from Concord, uninvited, with a tin spirit trumpet of the sort made famous at the Koons spirit room in Ohio. He climbed my back fence at dusk, set the trumpet to the still-house wall, and called upon the unquiet soul to speak. Something unquiet did. Barnaby, my black bear, lay three feet off in the dark with his chain slack, and he had had enough of strange men that week. He took the trumpet and the hand holding it, folding the tin into the shape and dignity of a stepped-on lobster, then gave one lazy sweep of the left paw and opened the man's scalp from crown to ear. I sat the Professor at my kitchen table, picked bramble and bear-hair from his skull with my dental tweezers, and sewed the flap back with dental silk, eleven stitches. He was the first patient I ever had who blamed the dead for the bill. That winter he lectured in Concord on 'The Violent Spirits of Pittsfield' at a quarter a head, hat off to show the scar. I have never seen a penny.

The Coppersmith in the Cold Tub

The moaning went on two more nights, and I confess I had not the faintest notion of its cause. So I sent for Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, master coppersmith, a man who listens to copper as a priest listens to confession. Here is the first lesson for the natural scientist: a ghost does not care where you stand, but metal does. Silas walked round the still-house and found the hum loudest at the worm tub. He put his ear to the stave and it buzzed his teeth.

Then he stripped off his boots, rolled his trousers, and climbed into October spring water with the lantern held high. Down in the tub he found it. The coil had dropped off its oak cleat at the third turn. Oak swells when wet and shrinks when the tub runs low, and it had let go of the copper. The whole worm hung loose; every slug of hot spirit knocked it, and vapour caught in a loop and collapsed with a little thump. As Silas put it: "Hit copper steady enough and it will sing to you all night long." It was a tuning fork the size of a man.

He cut oak wedges in the dark with his knife, drove them between coil and stave, riveted a copper strap round the third turn, and nailed it to fresh cleats. The hum quit in the middle of a note, and every dog in three townships fell silent at once. When I said my demon was only a loose bracket, Silas answered: "Most demons are, Doctor." The county never thanked him. The sexton told everyone his bell had driven off the spirit, and a deputy assessor of the revenue, hearing the hum on the turnpike, wrote the telegraph company to complain of a singing wire. There is no wire within miles. He listened to an illegal still for an hour and reported a public utility.

Silas finds faults before they ever sing by tapping. His father taught him with a hickory dowel no bigger than a pencil. Tap every turn and listen. A clean, even wall rings bright as a dinner bell; a thin spot, a kink, or a bad patch gives back a dead thud, like knocking on a coffin lid with somebody in it. He once bought a secondhand coil in Loudon with one turn ringing dead as a stone, warmed and worked it, and out slid a gold wedding ring the owner had hidden there from his wife. Silas sold it back to him, full price, in front of her.

Hums, Whistles, and Silence

Now the part that is no joke. A still that hums from a loose worm is a nuisance. A still that whistles or hisses is a warning, for vapour is escaping at a joint, seam, or cap, and alcohol vapour near an open fire is a lit fuse. Worse still is a still gone quiet when it ought to be running: the worm or line may be blocked by foaming mash or a wad of grain in the neck, and the pressure has nowhere to go. A still must never be sealed tight. I knew a Gilmanton man who boiled his pot dry with the arm plugged; the cap went through his roof and he went through his own front door without opening it. I pulled three of his teeth out of the doorframe. The rules: fire low, joints tight but never sealed shut, worm clear, nothing burning near a leak, and someone watching every minute it runs.

The Run, Jar by Jar

Rye is my favourite and my curse, sticky as a deacon's handshake and foaming like a mad dog. Raw grain is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch, so the mash needs malted barley, whose sprouted grain carries the ferment the chemists call diastase, turning starch to sugar. Cook the cracked rye and corn in the water, let it fall to about a hundred and fifty degrees, stir in the ground malt, and hold it warm while the malt works. You will taste it go sweet. Cool to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, and let it work in a warm room with the air moving. When it quits bubbling and goes sour and still, it is a wash.

Strain the solids and charge the pot only three-quarters full, leaving headroom so foam never climbs the neck and plugs the worm. Bring the heat up slow, for a hard fire scorches the bottom and blows foam upward. Catch the run in small jars, a pint or less, numbered in order. First come the foreshots and heads, sharp and varnish-smelling, carrying the methanol and the headaches; those go on the ground or in the lamp, never down a throat. Then the hearts, sweet and clean and smelling of grain. Then the tails creep in, smelling of wet cardboard or a cellar dog; set them aside for the next run. Let the jars sit open overnight under a cloth before you judge them. The nose is more honest in the morning.

Observe where the copper does its best work: in the vapour, in the helmet, neck, arm, and worm, where hot vapour touches bright metal. An iron pot with a copper neck does better than you would think; a copper pot with an iron neck does worse. And the copper pays for it, giving up a little of itself every run, until old necks grow thin enough to dent with your thumb while the pot below stays thick as a boot sole. Copper is like a good wife: it takes the poison out of all that passes through it, grows thinner every year, and gets no thanks.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Blue Flame

A correspondent from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, writes that his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Pour water through hardwood ash and you get lye, and ash and potash were among this state's first cash crops; settlers burned whole hillsides and boiled the ash down for market. Lye strips a hog and makes your soap, but in a thump keg it makes only a slick, stinking mess. The poison in the heads boils off early with the vapour, ash or no ash. The only cure is to discard the foreshots and heads, every time.

As for red oak, it is so open in the grain you can blow through a stick and bubble a glass of water, which is why coopers make barrels of white oak. Shavings will stain spirit tea-coloured and lend it a bark-bite of tannin, so young liquor may be sold as old. That is a dye, not a doctor. True that they did it, false that it worked.

Last, the blue flame. 'Proof' comes from the British pouring spirit on gunpowder; if the powder still lit, the spirit was proved strong, and that proved strength and nothing more. The wood spirit in the heads, the very poison you fear, burns a pale blue flame you can scarcely see by daylight. Judge your spirit by honest cuts and an honest nose, never by a parlour trick with a match. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.