A Sharp Pull-Back, and the Patient Virtue of Copper

Well now, the red metal has stumbled a touch today — down a modest 1.3 percent, with the Shanghai men telling us the market has settled into a wait-and-see mood. I have seen such moods before, in saloon and counting-house alike: everyone leaning on the bar, nobody buying the next round, all waiting for some other fellow to show his hand first. Our #1 Bare Bright sits near $6.26 the pound as I write — a fine figure for an honest day's gathering of clean wire, even on a sagging tape.

Let the paper-men fret over their pull-backs and their secondary reviews. I have never known copper to apologize for a slow Tuesday. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, and I will tell you plain: that metal moved hand to hand through every eating-house and grog-shop from Boston to the frontier, indifferent to whether some ledger said it had risen or fallen. Copper is the people's metal. It waits for no man, and it fears no dip.

And here is the thought I would press upon you while the traders dither — consider the still. The whiskey in your glass, the brandy and the rum, the mountain moonshine off some cousin's quiet worm: every drop of it owes its clean soul to copper. The pot still, the alembic, pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor the way a good priest draws sin from a sinner. Stainless cannot do it — stainless is a cold clerk that counts but does not cleanse. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the Appalachian hollow, the distiller has trusted the red metal for centuries, and he trusts it still, down day or up day. No commodity review ever changed the chemistry of a well-made dram.

Beyond the still, copper carries on its thousand quiet labors regardless of today's tape — threading through your water lines, warming the bottoms of good cookware, greening the roofs and gutters of patient houses, and above all conducting. Every electric motor, every wire, every humming data-hall and silent electric carriage of this modern age leans on copper as a drunkard leans on a lamp-post. That demand does not vanish because a market paused to catch its breath.

So my counsel to the scrapper, the plumber, the distiller, the trader: when the market plays coy, do not. Keep your Bare Bright bright, your #2 sorted honest, your brass and radiators squared away. A wait-and-see day is simply the market blinking. Copper does not blink — it merely waits, patient as green on a cathedral roof, for the world to remember it cannot do without the red metal.

Hold your copper, pour something cleansed by it, and be of good cheer.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins