Friends, scrappers, and quiet distillers of the small hours — I have read this morning's dispatch from the Shanghai men, who tell us that price constraints and maintenance have dragged down the Chinese imports of copper anode. The smelters, it seems, have shuttered their doors a while for repair, and the price would not coax the metal across the sea. So the great furnaces idle, and our red metal sits down today, off some three and eight-tenths in the hundred. The honest #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.38 the pound — a fine sum still, though the ticker frowns.
Now, what is an anode but copper on its way to becoming itself? A slab of impure metal, hung in the electrolytic bath, surrendering its sins to the current until it stands forth as cathode — pure, ruddy, conductive, fit for any noble work. It is the same alchemy I chased with hammer and counterstamp in my New England days, when I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand cents and sent them rattling through every saloon and eating-house in the land. Copper was the people's metal then, and the people's metal it remains, refining or no refining in Shanghai.
A maintenance shutdown does not frighten me, and it ought not frighten you. Furnaces cool and furnaces fire again; the demand beneath them never sleeps. Consider where copper goes. It runs in the wires that light your parlor and now hums in the great data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless age. It carries your water clean through the plumbing. It greens the rooftops and lines the bottoms of the good cookware.
But you know my truest love — the still. There is no spirit worth the swallowing that did not pass through copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm down in the holler — all of them red metal, because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and snatches out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise foul your whiskey, your brandy, your rum. The monks knew it at their alembics; the Appalachian man knows it at his worm. Stainless steel, that cold modern pretender, cannot do this work. It conducts no spirit and lends no grace. So when a Chinese smelter sits down for a spell, the world's distillers go on trusting the same metal they have trusted for six hundred years.
Let the price dip. The current still flows, the anode still dissolves, and somewhere a clean drop falls from a copper coil. That is reason enough to keep your scrap dry and your faith in the red metal firm.
Yours in copper and good spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from Shanghai Metals Market.