Copper Slips a Hair at $6.16: A Dispatch from the Still Room

Gentlemen of the scale and ladies of the sorting bin, gather close! Word arrives from the Shanghai Metals Market that copper prices have weakened and that the scrap trade there saw what the correspondents call "mediocre trading." Mediocre! A word never before applied to the red metal without a blush. Yet here at home the damage is slight: the whole copper market is off a mere 0.1% today, and #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.16 per pound on the national average. I have seen cents wobble more than that in a saloon on payday.

What does a quiet day in Shanghai tell us? That the great buyers of the world, the smelters, the wire-drawers and the fabricators, are catching their breath. Scrap is a barometer of appetite, and when appetite flags, the traders sit on their hands and sip. But a hesitation is not a collapse. Copper has been dismissed before, and it has always come back to the counter with its hat in its hand and its pockets full.

I speak as a man who once drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents across New England. Copper was the people's metal then, passed from palm to palm in every saloon and eating-house, my own Fort Wilkins included, where the caged bear glowered and the tooth-pulling chair awaited the unwary. Such coin never cared for a dull market. It simply went on circulating, and so does the metal today.

Consider where it circulates now. It runs in the wires that electrify everything, in the motors that turn the world's machinery, in the water lines under your floorboards, in the roofs and gutters that age to that noble green. And now it is hungered after by the data centers and the electric carriages of this modern age, each demanding miles of conductor. A soft day in one exchange does not unwrite that ledger.

But allow me to raise my glass, for copper's finest vocation is in the still room. The pot still, the alembic, the Appalachian moonshiner's humble worm: all are copper, and for good reason. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out sulfur compounds and other nasty volatiles, leaving the spirit clean and sweet. A stainless still cannot do this trick. From monastery alembics to the mountain hollow, distillers have trusted the red metal for centuries, and your whiskey, brandy and rum are better for it.

So, scrappers, my counsel is plain. Sort your Bare Bright from your #1 and #2, strip your insulated wire with patience, keep your brass and radiators honest, and do not sell your birthright in a sleepy hour. Copper is patient, and so should you be. Pour a dram, admire the glow of a good copper kettle, and let the market yawn.

Yours in red and gleaming earnest,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins