Come close to the counter, friend, and mind the bear — he's chained, mostly. The wires from the East rattle in this morning with word from IndexBox that the scrapyards of China have softened: aluminum down, copper down, and stainless steel sitting flat as a coffin lid. A fellow reading only that line might pull his cap low and mutter that the red metal has lost its luster.
He'd be mistaken. Here on honest American soil our #1 Bare Bright trades at about $5.47 the pound, and the market has nudged up six-tenths of a percent on the day. So while Shanghai sighs, our copper holds its head and tips its hat. Markets, like men in my old Fort Wilkins eating-house, will quarrel across the room and still buy each other a drink by sundown.
And speaking of drink — for there is no subject dearer to me — let us remember what copper does while the traders fret over a half a cent. Pour yourself a clean whiskey tonight and thank the red metal. That spirit ran as vapor through a copper pot still, an alembic descended in unbroken line from the monastery cellars and the Appalachian holler with its coiled copper worm. Copper is no idle decoration there; it reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles, and pulls them down so they never reach your glass. A stainless still cannot perform this small alchemy — it is deaf to the chemistry. That is why the distiller, from the Highland monk to the moonshiner with one eye on the revenue man, has trusted copper for centuries. A dip in the Chinese scrap quote changes none of it.
Nor does it change the wire humming behind your wall, the plumbing that carries clean water to your basin, the bright bottom of the good cook's pan, or the green-weathered gutter on the old church roof. It does not still the electric motors, nor the great data-halls and electric carriages of this restless modern age, all of them fed by the conductor that has no equal. Copper passes hand to hand as it always has — I knew that well in my counterstamping days, when I drove my name into a hundred thousand cents and watched them travel every saloon in New England.
So let the foreign yards mark their goods down. A flat day there, a firm day here — the long ledger of copper still runs in the black. Sort your bright from your insulated, weigh your brass and radiators true, and hold what you have a beat longer.
Yours in the red metal, ever the conductor of fortunes, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.