August's Widening Spread & the Patience of the Red Metal

Well now — the good clerks at Shanghai Metals Market send word of an August grown sleepy: a widening price spread, muted activity in the yards, and the invoices tangled up in constraints. And here at home the honest man's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.24 the pound, with the market down a modest half a percent on the day. A quiet month, they call it. I have seen quiet months before, friend, and I have learned that copper does not fret over them.

A widening spread is a curious beast. It means the fellows buying and the fellows selling stand a little further apart at the table than they'd like — the scrapper wants his fair coin, the mill wants its margin, and between them yawns a gap that patience alone will close. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, and I can tell you the red metal always found its way from hand to hand, saloon to eating-house, no matter how the traders squabbled. Copper is the people's metal. It waits for no clerk's invoice.

And while the market naps, let us remember what copper is actually doing out there in the world — for it is never idle. Somewhere in a hollow this very morning, a coil of copper worm is sweating clean spirit into a jug. That is copper's oldest and finest office. The pot still, the alembic — from the monastery cellars to the Appalachian moonshiner's shed — has always been raised of the red metal for one reason the chemists confirm and the drinkers have known for centuries: copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur, the mercaptans, the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison a good whiskey. A stainless still cannot do it. Only copper makes liquor fit to drink. Every clean brandy, every bright rum, owes its soul to a metal the market thinks is muted today.

Nor does it stop at the still. That same red thread runs through the wire lighting your street, the water line feeding your tap, the bright bottom of your wife's stew-pot, the green roofs weathering over the courthouse, and — mark me — the humming data-houses and electric carriages of this modern age, all of them thirsting for copper as a drunkard thirsts for the third pour.

So let the spread widen and the invoices lag. A slow August is merely the world catching its breath before it reaches, once more, for the metal it cannot live without. Hold your Bare Bright. It knows its worth better than any recap.

Yours in the red metal and the clean drop,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins