Copper Climbs While the Market Barely Sneezes — Aug 11

Step close and mind the caged bear — I have news from the ledgers today. IndexBox reports that copper and aluminum both made gains, while the rest of the scrap yard stood about as still as a Sunday preacher between sermons. And yet, the same wire tells me the copper market slipped a whisker — down two-tenths of one percent on the day. A gain in the headline, a shrug on the tape. Such is the trade, my friends: the red metal breathes in and out like a distiller's still working its charge.

As I write, #1 Bare Bright is fetching about $6.49 the pound across the nation — a handsome figure for the brightest, cleanest wire a scrapper ever stripped. That is copper with no coat and no apology, the aristocrat of the grade sheet. Do not let a two-tenths dip trouble your sleep; I have counterstamped more than a hundred thousand cents in my day and watched copper pass hand to hand through every saloon in New England, and I tell you it always finds its worth again.

Now permit an old alchemist his favorite sermon. Why does copper stand above the common metals? Ask any honest distiller. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all copper, and for good reason. When the vapor rises hot off the wash, copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise ride into your glass and ruin the dram. A stainless still cannot do this work; it merely conducts the liquor along, indifferent. Copper participates. From the monastery alembics of the cloistered brothers to the Appalachian hollows where the corn ran clear, spirits have been made clean by the red metal for centuries. Every smooth whiskey you have ever sipped owes a quiet debt to a sheet of copper.

And copper does not rest at the still. It is the wire that lights your parlor and the veins that carry your water. It bottoms your good cookware and greens your church roof over the slow decades. It hums inside every electric motor, and now it feeds those great humming data-halls and the electric carriages the young men are so proud of. Wherever man moves power or purifies a thing, copper is there — patient, ancient, indispensable.

So when the tape wobbles a fraction, I only smile. A distiller does not fret over a single degree on the thermometer; he minds the whole run. Sell your bright wire honest, keep your brass sorted from your radiators, and remember that you are trading in the one metal that makes both light and liquor possible.

Keep your copper bright and your spirits brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins