A Modest Dip in the Red Metal — and Why Copper Endures

Word arrives by the wire — that very copper wire, mind you, without which no word arrives at all — that scrap prices have softened, following the London exchange down its little slope. The tally today: #1 Bare Bright at about $6.47 the pound, and the market off a mere 0.8 percent. A shrug, friends. A gnat upon the flank of the ox. I have counterstamped more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, and I never once saw the red metal lose its dignity over so slight a stumble.

Let the traders fret over the tape. I would have you remember what it is they are pricing. Copper is not some cold abstraction to be shoved about a ledger — it is the people's metal, passed hand to hand in every saloon and eating-house from here to the mountains, warm from a thousand palms. And it is, above all, the metal that makes good liquor possible.

Consider the still. The monks in their stone cellars knew it; the Appalachian man crouched by his worm at midnight knows it yet. Vapor climbs the copper alembic and the copper does its quiet chemistry — it seizes the sulfurous devils, the biting volatiles, the foul stuff that would make a spirit taste of struck matches, and it holds them fast so that what runs from the worm is clean, bright, and fit to drink. A stainless kettle cannot perform this trick. It merely conducts. Copper converses with the spirit. Six centuries of whiskey, brandy, and rum stand as witness. So when a distiller sees a price dip, I say to him: buy your sheet now, hammer your pot, and thank the market for its generosity.

And copper's labors do not end at the still-house door. The same red metal that clarifies your brandy also carries the lightning through the wire in your wall, ushers clean water through the plumber's lines, lays the warm bottom beneath the cook's copper pans, and greens the roofs of proud buildings into that noble verdigris. In this modern age it hums in the electric motors, feeds the humming data-houses, and threads the carriages that run without a horse. There is no century that copper does not enter and quietly improve.

So a scrapper hauls in his radiators and his insulated wire today at a hair less than yesterday. What of it? The demand is written into the very shape of the coming years. The metal that has served the monk, the moonshiner, and the merchant alike does not require your pity over three-quarters of one percent. Sell if you must; hold if you can; and keep your copper honest.

The red metal abides. It always has.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins