China Trims Copper While Aluminum Struts — Bare Bright Holds

Word arrives from the great scrapyards of China, by way of the ledger-keepers at IndexBox: copper has slipped a touch while aluminum puts on airs and climbs. Here at home the honest measure of the red metal — #1 Bare Bright at about $6.49 the pound — has eased a mere half a percent on the day. A shrug, friends, not a swoon. I have driven my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, and I can tell you the red metal does not panic at a headline out of the East.

Let aluminum rise. Let it puff itself up like a barroom braggart. It is a fine light metal for a can or a windowframe, but I would not distill my supper liquor through it, nor would you. When the vapor climbs the neck of a copper still — the alembic the monks knew, the pot still, the moonshiner's worm coiled cold in the branch water — it is copper alone that seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and casts them out, leaving the spirit clean and sweet upon the tongue. Stainless cannot do it. Aluminum surely cannot. Centuries of whiskey, brandy, and rum owe their very drinkability to this one red metal, and no market report in Shanghai will change that chemistry.

So when the traders tell me copper dipped a whisker, I think of all the labors that half-percent scarcely disturbs. Copper is the wire that carries the lightning into your parlor; it is the winding in every electric motor and the artery of these humming data-halls and electric carriages the modern age so adores. It is the plumber's water line and the cook's warm-bottomed pan, the roof that weathers to a noble green, the brass on the tavern rail, the bronze in the statue. It is the coin passed hand to hand in every eating-house — I ran such a house myself, with a caged bear out front and a tooth-pulling chair within, and copper cents rang in the till all the same.

My counsel to the scrapper: keep your grades honest and your Bare Bright bright. Sort your #1 from your #2, your insulated wire from your radiators, and do not let a foreign dip talk you into selling cheap. A day's soft trade is a ripple; copper's long story is a river, and it runs red and true.

Aluminum may rise today. But it will never make a drop of good liquor, and it will never be the people's metal. Copper was, is, and shall remain.

Yours in the red metal and the clean spirit,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins