China Stirs the Pot: Copper Rises, and the Red Metal Answers

Well now — word arrives from the East by way of IndexBox, and the news is agreeable to my old copper heart. The scrap yards of China report copper, aluminum, and even stainless steel climbing, while steel lies flat as week-old ale. And note well which metal I mention first, for it is always first in my ledger and in the ledger of any man who knows his trade.

Here at home the tale is just as bright. #1 Bare Bright is fetching about $5.49 the pound, and the market has risen 1.6% on the day. When the whole wide world reaches for the same red metal at once, the price does what water does — it seeks its level, and today that level is up.

Why should a distant report from Chinese scrap-heaps quicken my pulse? Because copper is the one metal the world cannot conspire to do without. Consider, friend, the humble whiskey in your glass. It did not come clean and sweet from a vessel of cold steel — no sir. It was born in copper. The pot still, the alembic the old monks bent over their brandy, the coiled worm of the Appalachian moonshiner sweating in the laurel thicket — all copper, and for good reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils and rank volatiles that would otherwise sour the spirit. Stainless steel cannot manage the trick. Centuries of distillers, from cloistered abbeys to backwoods hollows, have staked their reputations on copper, and every honest dram is proof.

But copper's labors do not end at the still. The same metal that sweetens your liquor carries the lightning through the wires in your walls, moves the water clean through your pipes, warms the bottoms of your good cookware, and greens the rooftops handsomely with age. In this electric era it winds through every motor, hums in the great data-halls, and drives the new electric carriages down the avenue. Small wonder the yards of two continents bid it upward on the same morning.

I knew copper's worth long before the tickers did. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents — the people's metal, passed hand to hand across every saloon bar and eating-house counter in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them. Copper was money then and it is nearer to money now than ever.

So bring in your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your bright coils of wire. The world is buying, and the red metal is telling you plainly what it is worth. Sell honest, weigh true, and raise a copper-distilled glass to the finest conductor God ever buried in the ground.

Yours in the red metal, ever and always,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins