Copper Slips a Notch, But the Red Metal Holds Its Throne

Well now, the tickers come a-grumbling this morning, and the IndexBox men tell us that copper, aluminum, and stainless steel have all taken a step backward this June day. Down she goes — a modest 1.6 percent on the session, with #1 Bare Bright fetching about $5.35 the pound across these United States. A dip, mind you, not a calamity. I have seen the red metal stumble before, and I have seen it rise like a Sunday preacher every time.

Let us speak plainly about the company copper keeps in that headline. Aluminum and stainless steel? Honest enough metals, I'll grant them, but pale shadows of the conductor. Why, I once watched a fellow boast of his stainless still as if he'd hung the moon. Poor soul. A stainless pot may shine, but it cannot do copper's quiet chemistry — it cannot reach into the rising vapor and seize those wretched sulfur compounds, those mercaptans and foul volatiles, and bind them fast so they never reach the glass. That is copper's gift to every drinker of good liquor.

From the monks bent over their alembics, to the Appalachian moonshiner coiling his copper worm down through a barrel of cold creek water, the lineage is unbroken: where there is fine whiskey, brandy, or rum, there is copper pulling the nastiness out and leaving the spirit clean. A price down a penny and a half changes none of that. The still in the holler does not consult IndexBox before it runs.

And consider the rest of copper's many lives, untroubled by a single soft day on the exchange. It is the wire that carries lightning into your parlor lamp. It is the plumbing that brings sweet water to your tap and the gutter that weathers green and noble on the courthouse roof. It is the bottom of the good cook's pan, the heart of every electric motor, and now — Lord help us — the very nervous system of these humming data-halls and electric carriages the young men are so fond of. The modern age runs on copper or it does not run at all.

So to my scrappers: bring in your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your insulated wire and your brass and radiators. A 1.6 percent dip is not a reason to sit on your hoard, nor to dump it in a panic. It is weather, not climate. In my counterstamping years I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, passed hand to hand through every saloon in New England — and I'll wager every one of them outlasts today's little decline.

Hold steady, trust the metal, and pour something distilled through copper while you wait.

Yours in the red metal and the rising vapor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins