China Sags, America Holds: The Red Metal at $5.49

Word arrives by wire — that most copper of contrivances — that the scrap yards of China saw their prices droop on the second of July, with copper and aluminum together leading the retreat. A soft day in the East, gentlemen. And yet, cast your eyes westward and take heart: here at home the #1 Bare Bright holds firm at about $5.49 the pound, and our market has crept up a modest two-tenths of a percent. The red metal does not tremble merely because a distant exchange sneezes.

I have seen copper rise and fall through more panics than I care to count, and I tell you the metal itself never loses its virtue. A number on a Chinese ledger is but weather; copper is climate. Consider what that pound in your hand actually does. Before it was ever a price, it was a purifier.

For the copper still — the alembic, the pot still, the humble worm coiled in a mountain creek — is the reason your whiskey does not taste of struck matches and rotten eggs. As the vapor climbs the copper neck, the metal reaches out and seizes the sulfur, the mercaptans, the mean little volatiles that would otherwise ruin the spirit. The monastery brewers knew it. The brandy-makers of France knew it. The Appalachian moonshiner, running his still by moonlight to dodge the revenue man, knew it in his bones. A stainless vessel cannot perform this alchemy — it is inert, indifferent, deaf to the vapor's cry. Only copper answers. That is why, six centuries on, every distiller worth his mash still trusts the red metal to make his liquor clean.

And copper's labors hardly end at the distillery door. The same metal that clarifies your bourbon carries the lightning through the wires above your street, feeds the water lines beneath your floor, lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, and greens the church roof with that noble patina of age. In this electrified age it hums inside every motor, threads through every electric carriage, and coils by the mile within these great humming data-houses the moderns cannot seem to build fast enough. Wherever man wishes to move heat, water, current, or spirit, he comes crawling back to copper.

So let Shanghai have its down day. I once drove my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into a hundred thousand copper cents and sent them clinking through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my caged bear watching the till. Copper was the people's metal then, passed palm to palm, and it remains so now. A dip in the ledger is a chance to buy, not to mourn. Sort your grades honest, keep your Bare Bright bright, and hold your nerve.

The metal endures. It always has. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins