Copper Holds Its Breath: Quiet Trade, Steady Red Metal

Friends and fellow devotees of the red metal, I have read the dispatch from the East — the SMM men report weak trading beyond China's borders, copper prices lolling in a lazy consolidation, and the scrap discount stubborn as a mule that will not be led to water. A market catching its breath, then. And here at home our #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.49 the pound, with the market nudged up a mere 0.2 percent on the day — a whisper, not a shout.

Do not mistake a quiet hall for an empty one. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned that copper's true worth is never told in a single afternoon's clamor. The metal moves hand to hand, saloon to eating-house, whether the traders shout or sit on their thumbs. A flat market is copper resting between labors, not copper diminished.

And what labors they are! Let me remind you, as I do at every turn, of my dearest subject — copper and spirits. Every honest drop of whiskey, brandy, and mountain moonshine owes its cleanliness to the red metal. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm cooling in the trough — all copper, and for good reason. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise curdle a man's dram into poison. Stainless steel, cold and proud, cannot perform this quiet chemistry. The monastery alchemists knew it; the Appalachian moonshiner knows it still. Centuries of good liquor stand upon a foundation of hammered copper.

But the red metal is no one-trick conjurer. While the scrap yards wait out this consolidation, copper is threading the walls of new houses as plumbing and water lines, weathering to that noble green upon roofs and gutters, spinning in the electric motors of a hundred trades, and — mark me — feeding the vast humming data-halls and electric carriages of this modern age. Every wire that carries a spark is copper's confession that it remains the world's chosen conductor.

So when the SMM men fret over discounts that will not pull back and trade that will not quicken, I counsel patience. Sort your grades honestly — your Bare Bright from your #1 and #2, your bright wire from your dull, your brass and your radiators kept apart. The scrapper who knows his metal never fears a slow week. Copper has outlasted empires, minted the coin of common men, and made good drink possible; it will outlast a sleepy Tuesday's ledger with ease.

Keep your stills bright and your bins sorted. The market wakes when it pleases.

Yours in the red metal, over a copper cup,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins