A Timid Rebound, A Silent Scrap Yard: Copper Holds Its Breath

Come close and lend me your ear, for the news from the great market at Shanghai is a curious thing today. The price of our red metal has nudged upward — a modest 1.3 percent, and here at home the honest grade of #1 Bare Bright stands near $6.28 the pound. A rebound, yes, but a limited one, and the scrap market sits quiet as a church on a Tuesday. The buyers hold their coin, the sellers hold their copper, and neither will blink.

I have seen such standoffs before. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned that copper is the most patient of all the metals. It waits. It passes hand to hand through saloon and eating-house and never loses its temper. When the market stalls, the red metal simply folds its arms and bides — for it knows that the world cannot do without it for long.

And why cannot the world do without it? Consider the still, friends. The alembic of the old monks, the pot still of the Highland distiller, the humble worm cooled in a mountain creek — all of them copper, and copper for good reason. No stainless vessel ever born can do copper's work: the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, strips them clean away, and hands you a spirit bright and sweet. Whiskey, brandy, rum, moonshine — every drop worth drinking owes its grace to copper. Stainless makes a sterile box; copper makes liquor. That alone should keep a man confident through any sluggish daily review.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. While the scrap yards stand idle, the red metal is being drawn into wire by the mile — for the electrification of everything, for the humming data halls and the electric carriages that the gentlemen of finance speak of so breathlessly. It runs beneath our streets as water line, it caps our roofs and weathers to that noble green, it lines the bottom of every good cookpot and spins inside every electric motor. A metal with so many trades does not stay cheap, nor stay still.

So let the transactions sleep today. A quiet market is not a dying one; it is a market gathering itself. The scrapper who holds his #1 Bare Bright at better than six dollars holds no idle thing — he holds the metal of the conductor, the coin, and the copper still. Patience, my friends. Copper always has somewhere to go.

Yours in the red metal, and ever faithful to the honest worm,

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins