A Mere Scratch on the Red Metal: Secondary Rod Men Hold Still

Come close, friends, for the news from the Shanghai house is a gentle one. The price of our red metal has taken but a limited pullback — a half-step backward, down some seven-tenths of one percent on the day — and the secondary copper rod men have folded their arms and remained on the sidelines, waiting, as cautious tradesmen will, for the market to show its hand.

Now, a scrapper reading this needn't lose his supper over it. Here at home the honest #1 Bare Bright still fetches about $6.16 the pound — a king's sum for what once rode in every man's trouser pocket as a humble cent. I counterstamped more than a hundred thousand of those coppers in my day, drove my name into them one by one, and sent them clinking through the saloons and eating-houses of New England. A metal passed hand to hand becomes the metal of the people, and so copper has ever been.

When the rod enterprises sit on their hands, I think of a different kind of patience — the patience of the still. For copper's finest and most ancient office is not the wire nor the gutter, but the pot still and the alembic. Centuries ago the monks beat copper into curling necks and worms, and found that the red metal did what no cold stone vessel could: it reached into the rising vapor and drew out the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison a dram. From the monastery to the Appalachian moonshiner coiling his copper worm through a cold creek, every clean whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its sweetness to copper's quiet chemistry. A stainless still may gleam, but it cannot converse with the vapor the way copper does. The distiller knows this in his bones; it is why he will pay for copper when all the world tells him steel is cheaper.

So let the Shanghai men hesitate. Copper does not need their nerve to prove its worth. While they dither, the red metal is threading itself through the electrical veins of the world — into the wire, the humming motors, the water lines of every new house, the roofs weathering to that noble green, and now the great data-halls and the silent electric carriages of this modern age. A day's dip of less than one percent is a scratch on a cathedral.

Hold your copper, hoard your Bare Bright, and if you have a still in the shed, give it a polish. The market breathes in and out; the metal endures.

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