Gallery
Mines #22, Kennecott Copper Mine, Bingham Valley, Utah, 1983. Photograph by Edward Burtynsky.
When you came, you said to me:
“I will give fine quality copper ingots.”
You left, but you did not do what you promised me.
You put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said:
“If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”
What do you take me for that you treat me with such contempt?
From the Babylonian ‘complaint tablet to Ea-Nasir,’ written in cuneiform, ca. 1750 BCE. It has been called the oldest customer service complaint in history.
Suspended by Egeværk, 2020, boiled oak and copper thread. Private Collection. Images courtesy of Egeværk.
The Great Bartholdi Statue, Liberty Enlightening the World: The Gift of France to the American People. Published by Currier & Ives., ca. 1885, chromolithograph print. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
I looked at the ornaments on the desk.
Everything standard and all copper.
A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder.
There was a spray of almost copper- colored sweet peas in a copper vase.
It seemed like a lot of copper.
—Raymond Chandler The High Window (1942)
Copper and brass processing, Photographed by Alfred T. Palmer, February 1942. Chase Brass and Copper Company, Euclid, Ohio. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The earliest weapons were hands, nails and teeth.
Next came stones and branches wrenched from trees, and fire and flame as soon as these were discovered.
Then men learnt to use tough iron and copper.
With copper they tilled the soil.
With copper they whipped up the clashing waves of war.
—Lucretius
Elecrotyped copper negative disc of a sound recording deposited at SI in October 1881 in sealed tin box. Content: Tone; voice saying. “One, two, three, four, five, six”. Photograph: Rich Strauss, Smithsonian.
Food Plinth by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, ca. 2000, copper, depth x diam.: 3 x 22 in. Courtesy of the artist.
The Finn walking out of the mine,
When the dark hills have crawled over the sun,
Has the shade of copper;
The red dust is ground in him.
He quits the mine,
But it comes along with him —
Red dust ground under his nails,
Red dust in his brain.
—Excerpt from Copper Dust, by Milton Burgh.
Jo (canceled plate) by James McNeill Whistler, 1861, Copper plate, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Robert N. Whittemore, Yale BS 1943, B2014.22.21
Jo by James McNeill Whistler, 1861. Etching and drypoint print, with drypoint cancellation. lma / aw / Alamy Stock Photo.
