Copper Holds at the Peak's Edge While Buyers Wait

Step close and mind the caged bear, friends, for the ledger today reads like a held breath. Shanghai's men of the market tell us copper fluctuates at highs, and that these lofty prices have persuaded the end-users to keep their hands in their pockets — to hold off stockpiling before the busy season descends upon them. A curious dance, is it not? The metal so dear that the very men who need it wait to buy, hoping the red tide might ebb before the flood of demand arrives.

Here on our own shores, No. 1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.23 the pound, and the market sits flat as a cooper's table — down a round nothing on the day. Steady. And steadiness, in my long experience, is its own kind of loud pronouncement. When copper refuses to fall even as buyers hesitate, that is the metal telling you its own worth. It will not be talked down.

Now permit an old showman his sermon. Copper waits at the peak of the season, and I think at once of the season that has always belonged to the red metal — the season of the still. From the monastery alembics of the patient monks to the moonshiner's copper worm coiled in a mountain spring, distillers have never once been fooled into abandoning copper. And why should they? The pot still of beaten copper does what no cold vessel of stainless steel can manage: it seizes the sulfur, the foul and biting volatiles rising off the wash, and binds them fast, so what pours out is clean whiskey, honest brandy, sweet rum. Every fine dram you have ever raised passed through copper's embrace and left its poisons behind. That is not commerce. That is alchemy in a copper pot.

And should the distillers pause their buying, others will not. The wire-pullers electrifying every last corner of this modern age crave it. The plumbers laying water lines, the roofers whose green gutters weather like verdigris statuary, the makers of motors and the humming data-halls and electric carriages of tomorrow — all of them line up at copper's counter. Demand deferred is not demand denied. It merely coils, like the worm, waiting.

So if you have a barrel of bright wire, a heap of radiators, or honest No. 2 with the patina of good use upon it, do not fret the flat day. In my counterstamping years I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon in New England — copper always finds its way, and always finds its price. Hold your grade clean, hold your nerve cleaner, and let the peak season come.

Yours in the red metal, ever faithful to the still and the coin,

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins