Word arrives from the far markets of China, by way of IndexBox, that on this June day the scrap trade marched in three directions at once — copper climbing, aluminum climbing, and stainless steel slumping into the dust. I confess I read it with a smile. The world may shuffle its lesser metals like a card-sharp at my old Fort Wilkins, but the red metal keeps finding its way upward, as it always has.
Mind you, here at home the day was less kind. Our honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.35 the pound, and the market has slipped 2.7 percent by the closing bell. A scrapper's stomach turns at such a dip. But I have stamped my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, and I tell you the metal does not care a whit for a single bad afternoon. It has outlasted empires, and it will outlast this Tuesday.
Now, that stainless steel sliding while copper rises — there is a parable in it, and I'd be a poor showman not to draw the curtain on it. Ask any distiller worth his mash why he will not abide a stainless still. He'll tell you, if he's honest, that steel is a dead thing in the vapor. It conducts nothing of the spirit's soul. Copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm down in the Appalachian hollow — all copper, because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils and the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the cup. The monks knew it in their stone monasteries. The Highland Scot knows it. Stainless steel may be cheaper, but it cannot perform that quiet alchemy, and so it falls in the markets while copper holds its head high.
And copper does so much besides. It is the wire threading through every wall, the pipe carrying clean water to the kitchen, the bottom of the good cook's pan, the roof that greens itself in beauty over decades. It hums in the motors of the new electric carriages and feeds the great data-halls humming day and night with the world's chatter. The Chinese buyers know what they are reaching for. So should you.
So do not weep over a 2.7 percent stumble, my friends. Sell your radiators and your insulated wire on a stronger day if you can wait; the red metal always rallies. The conductor of light, the purifier of spirits, the coin of the common man — it has never once let the centuries down, and it shan't begin now.
Keep your copper bright and your barrels honest.
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.