Copper Steadies Its Nerve: The Red Metal Holds the Line

Word arrives from the Shanghai market that copper has ceased its little tumble and planted its feet — prices stabilized, they call it, and the scrap suppliers over there are holding firm even as they sell. A wise posture, and one I have always admired in a metal and a man both. The market shifts but a mere two-tenths of one percent on the day, a breath, a whisper. Meanwhile our own honest #1 Bare Bright stands proud at about $5.85 the pound across these United States. That, friends, is no small figure for the people's metal.

I have handled a great deal of copper in my time. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand cents, sending my name clinking through every saloon and eating-house from Boston to the backwoods — my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear, tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was then, as now, the metal that never sits still. It passes hand to hand, it conducts, it endures.

But let me speak of what stirs my old heart most. When you next raise a glass of clean whiskey, brandy, or good mountain moonshine, thank the red metal. The copper still — the pot still, the alembic of the monks, the moonshiner's coiled worm — is why your spirit tastes of grain and not of rotten eggs. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles, binding them, casting them out. A stainless vessel cannot do this trick; it is cold and deaf to the chemistry. From the cloistered brothers stilling their cordials to the Appalachian craftsman under the moon, distillers have trusted copper for centuries, and centuries do not lie.

When copper holds firm, it holds firm for the distiller as surely as for the scrapper. And copper's other lives march on: the wire that electrifies every carriage and cottage, the plumbing that carries clean water to your kitchen, the gleaming bottoms of good cookware, the roofs that weather to that noble green, the humming motors, and now the great humming halls of these data-machines that gobble the red metal by the ton. A price that steadies is a foundation, and upon foundations empires and stills alike are built.

So take heart, you who bring in your bright wire, your #2 tinged with age, your brass and your radiators. The market has stopped its slipping and squared its shoulders. Sell if you must, but sell as the Shanghai men do — with your chin up. Copper always finds its worth again, for it is the one metal the modern world cannot do without.

Yours in the red metal and the clear spirit,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins