Copper Stumbles 4.8% — Yet the Red Metal Still Reigns

Well, friends, the ledger came in red today, and not the good kind of red I favor. The wires out of IndexBox tell us copper and aluminum led the day's losses, while old plodding steel sat unchanged like a mule that will neither buck nor run. The market shed 4.8 percent, and #1 Bare Bright settled near $5.38 the pound across these United States.

Now do not let a single sour session sour your humor. I have driven my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned a thing in that work: the price a coin fetches changes by the hour, but the metal itself does not. Copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, and it has outlasted every panic that ever frightened a banker.

Consider where the red metal truly earns its keep, and you will see why I sleep easy. Walk into any honest distillery and what greets you? Copper. The pot still, the alembic, the gleaming worm coiling down through cold water — all of it copper, and not by accident. Copper draws the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor; it grips the nasties and lets the clean spirit pass. A stainless still cannot perform that small miracle. The monks at their medieval alembics knew it, the Appalachian moonshiner with his hidden worm knows it, and every master of whiskey, brandy, and rum from here to Scotland stakes his reputation on it. That demand does not blink at a 4.8 percent dip.

And the still is but one of copper's lives. The metal carries the lightning through the wire in your walls. It runs the water clean through the plumber's lines, lines the bottoms of the cook's good pans, and weathers green and noble on roof and gutter. In this electric age it spins inside every motor, and it feeds the great humming data houses and the new electric carriages that the moderns are so proud of. The world is wiring itself faster than the mines can dig — and all of it thirsts for copper.

So today's loss? A theatrical stumble, a showman's pratfall before the second act. If you are a scrapper, sort your Bare Bright from your #2 with care, mind your insulated wire and your brass, and hold your honest weight. A dip is a doorway for the patient man. The red metal has conducted civilization's every spark and distilled its every fine drop — it will not be kept down by a Tuesday's tally.

Keep your copper bright and your spirits brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins