A Slight Dip in the East, and the Red Metal Endures

They tell me the market at China's scrap yards has softened this second of July — copper and aluminum alike bending a trifle downward, so says the counting-house of IndexBox. And here at home, our own #1 Bare Bright holds near $5.50 the pound, the whole market slipping a mere six-tenths of a percent. I have seen bigger frights over a spilled tankard. A sixth of one percent! Why, that is scarcely a sneeze in the great red ledger.

Let the traders of Shanghai fret over their fractions. I have driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents and more, and I never once saw a cent lose its worth by passing hand to hand across a saloon bar. Copper is the people's metal, and a soft market is nothing but a well-set table for the man with sense enough to buy.

Consider what a small decline cannot touch. Somewhere tonight, in a hollow in the Appalachians or a licensed rickhouse in Kentucky, a copper pot still stands over a low fire, its swan-neck gleaming, its worm coiled cold. That vessel is doing what no ledger can price: it is drawing the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor, gentling the raw wash into whiskey clean enough to please a bishop. A stainless still cannot do this — it has no chemistry in its soul. From the monastery alembics of the old alchemists to the moonshiner's homemade rig, the craft has trusted the red metal for a thousand years, and a Tuesday's dip in China will not undo a single one of them.

And copper's other lives march on regardless. It runs as wire through every wall, carrying the lightning that lights your lamp; it plumbs the water to your basin; it lines the bottom of the good cook's pan; it greens the roofs of proud houses over slow decades. In this modern age it feeds the humming motors of electric carriages and the vast copper-veined halls where the thinking-machines of the data-houses do their reckoning. The world grows hungrier for the conductor with each passing season, dip or no dip.

So my counsel to the scrapper is plain: keep your Bare Bright sorted from your #2, your brass from your radiators, and do not let a headline from across the ocean rattle your nerve. A market that falls six-tenths of a percent is a market that will rise again, for the world cannot run its liquor, its wires, nor its lights without the metal in your bin.

Buy low, distill clean, and keep the red metal moving.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins