A Dip in the Red Metal: Copper Slips as China Trades Mixed

Come close, friend, and let me read you the ticker as one reads the weather over the mountains. Word arrives from the Chinese markets this July the sixteenth: aluminum climbs, stainless steel puts on airs, and our beloved copper — the red metal, the people's metal — steps back a pace. Down 1.2 percent on the day, and #1 Bare Bright here at home resting at about $5.97 the pound. A modest retreat, nothing to send a man to the tooth-pulling chair over.

Let the aluminum crowd puff their chests. Aluminum will roof a shed and can a beverage, and stainless will make you a serviceable sink. But I ask you this, as one who has watched more vapor rise through more copper than most men have seen in a lifetime: can either of them make good liquor? They cannot. The stainless still is a cold, dumb vessel — it merely holds the run. It is copper, and copper alone, that reaches into the rising spirit and pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out of it. From the monks bent over their alembics, to the Appalachian moonshiner coiling his copper worm through a barrel of creek water, the lineage is unbroken and it is red. A dip in price does not dim a metal that has been trusted for a thousand years to make the difference between medicine and poison.

And copper does not sulk at a bad day's trade. While the market frets, the red metal is out doing its quiet work everywhere at once. It threads the walls of your house as plumbing, carries the current that lights the lamp you read this by, sits in the belly of every electric motor, and now floods into the great humming data-houses and the silent electric carriages of this modern age. Every one of those marvels is a debt owed to copper. A soft market only means the wise scrapper hauls his load knowing the world's appetite has not shrunk one ounce.

So sort your grades honest, as I always counsel — your Bare Bright bright, your #1 and #2 kept true, your brass and radiators apart from the wire. A 1.2 percent dip is a passing cloud, not a storm. I have seen copper pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house I ever kept, my own name driven into a hundred thousand cents, and I tell you the demand for this metal is written into the age itself.

Hold your copper, distill your spirit, and let the aluminum men have their little parade. Tomorrow the ticker turns again.

Yours in the red metal, from the counterstamp to the still,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins