China Wavers, But the Red Metal Rises — $5.81 Bare Bright

Well now, the wires out of China come to us mixed this July 29th — a market that cannot decide whether it is coming or going, like a man three drinks into a debate with himself. And yet here on our own shores the honest scrapper's prize, #1 Bare Bright, sits at about $5.81 the pound, and the copper trade is up a handsome 2.2 percent on the day. Let the Orient dither; the red metal answers to its own drum.

I have never known copper to stay confused for long. It is too useful a servant. In my counterstamping days I drove my name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into more than a hundred thousand cents across New England, and I chose copper for the deed because it was the people's metal, passing hand to hand through every saloon, eating-house, and my own Fort Wilkins besides, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. What the common man holds, the common man values. A mixed market in Shanghai does not change that eternal arithmetic.

But you will forgive an old showman for steering, as ever, toward my dearest subject — copper and spirits. Consider that of all the trades keeping this metal in demand, none is nobler than the still. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — every one wrought of copper, and for good reason no stainless vessel can supply. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur compounds and foul volatiles that would ruin a dram, dragging them down and leaving the whiskey, the brandy, the rum, the mountain moonshine clean upon the tongue. The monks knew it in their monastery alembics; the Appalachian man knows it at his creekside fire. Centuries of drinkable liquor are a debt owed to this one obliging metal.

And copper is not finished earning its keep. It runs as wire through the veins of every electrified city, warms the bottoms of the cook's finest pans, carries clean water through the plumber's lines, and greens gently upon the grandest roofs. Now they tell me it feeds the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages that glide about without a horse in sight. Every motor turning in this modern age turns on a coil of copper. Small wonder the price climbs while China scratches its head.

So sort your grades honestly, friends — Bare Bright from #1, #2 from your insulated wire, your brass and radiators kept apart — and carry your load to the yard while the market smiles at 2.2 percent. A distiller somewhere is fitting a fresh copper worm this very hour, and he will bless you for the metal.

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