China Buys the Red Metal While Aluminum Slinks Off

Word arrives from the far side of the world, by way of the number-mongers at indexbox.io: on this seventeenth of August, the Chinese scrap yards saw copper march upward while aluminum shuffled down the alley with its hat in its hand. There is a lesson in that pairing, and it is one I have preached from every counterstamped cent I ever hammered — the red metal endures, and the lesser metals merely keep it company.

Here on our own shores the reckoning is quieter: #1 Bare Bright runs near $6.49 the pound, and the market slipped a bare tenth of a percent — a whisper, a rounding, the price catching its breath. I have seen copper rise and fall like the tide at Portsmouth, and a tenth of a percent would not stir a sleeping cat. Bright wire is still king of the pile, and the scrapper who brings it in clean is paid like a gentleman.

Now, why does the Orient reach for copper while turning up its nose at aluminum? Because copper does things no substitute can do. It carries the lightning through every wire that hums behind your walls; it lines the plumbing that keeps your water sweet; it beats green upon the church roof and greets a century of rain. And these hungry new data-halls and electric carriages — they devour copper by the ton, for aluminum cannot conduct with half the grace.

But you know my true devotion. Set aside the motors and the roofs, and let me speak of the still. There is no spirit worth drinking that did not pass through copper first. The monastery alembic, the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm dripping in the creek, the great pot stills of Kentucky and Scotland — all copper, all for one holy reason: the red metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and holds them fast, so that what drips out the other end is clean and kind to the tongue. A stainless kettle is a dead thing; it cannot converse with the vapor. Copper is alive in the argument. Every clean whiskey ever poured at my old Fort Wilkins — where the bear paced its cage and the tooth-pulling chair waited for the brave — owed its virtue to copper.

So let China buy, and let aluminum sulk. The metal that conducts our age and purifies our liquor was passed hand to hand in every saloon before it ever lit a city. A tenth of a percent is nothing. Copper's story is measured in centuries, not in a single day's ledger.

Keep your bright wire bright, and your still gleaming.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins