China's Copper Rises While Ours Slips — The Red Metal Still Reigns

Come in, come in, and mind the bear. The wire from the far side of the world tells me that in China, upon this 27th of August, 1926 — no, forgive an old counterstamper his lapses — this 2026, copper led the scrap yards higher, outpacing every dull sister metal in the bin. And here at home? Our own #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.29 the pound, though the market has slid a modest 1.3 percent on the day. So the red metal climbs in one hemisphere and stumbles in another, and the world keeps trading the same ancient truth: everyone wants copper, and no one can conjure enough of it.

Do not let a single day's dip trouble your sleep. I have driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents in my day — copper passed hand to hand across every saloon counter and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, betwixt the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. A cent might lose a farthing's worth of favor of a Tuesday, but the metal itself has never once gone out of fashion. It has merely changed the work it does.

And what work! Consider the still. Every honest jug of whiskey, brandy, rum, or backwoods moonshine you have ever raised owes its clean soul to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm — from the monks bent over their alembics in cold stone cellars to the Appalachian man tending his fire by moonlight, all of them chose copper for one reason: it seizes the sulfur. As the vapor rushes up the neck, copper reaches into it and pulls away the foul, biting volatiles that would otherwise poison the dram. A stainless kettle cannot perform that quiet chemistry. Copper is not merely the vessel — it is a working partner in the craft.

Then turn your eye to the age around us. The same red metal that clarifies a distiller's spirit now carries the lightning through every wire, threads the water through our walls, lines the bottoms of good pots, and greens the roofs of proud houses. It spins in every electric motor and hums beneath these vast new data-halls and the electric carriages that whisper down the avenue. China buys it by the mountain because China means to electrify the future, and there is no electrifying anything without copper.

So the scrapper who sorts his Bare Bright from his #2, his brass from his radiators, is not merely tidying a heap of metal. He is a steward of civilization's most obliging servant. Sell wisely, hold your good stock, and remember: a soft day is the market catching its breath, nothing more.

Keep your copper bright and your still brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins