East Sells While West Buys: The Red Metal Holds Its Nerve

Word arrives by the wire — that very copper wire I am forever singing the praises of — that the scrapyards of China have marked their copper and aluminum a touch lower, while their stainless steel stands stubborn as a mule. And what, pray, does the West do in reply? Our own #1 Bare Bright holds proud at some $5.99 the pound, and the market itself climbs 0.7% on the day. When one hemisphere yawns and the other still bids up the red metal, you may take it as proof that copper answers to no single master.

Now, I have driven my name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, and I learned early that copper is the people's metal, passing hand to hand from saloon to eating-house to the very palm that pulled a tooth in my chair at Fort Wilkins. A metal so beloved does not crumple because a distant yard trimmed its offer.

Let me remind you why. Mark that the news bunches stainless steel in with copper as though they were cousins. They are nothing of the kind — and the distiller knows it best of all. Try to run your mash through a stainless still and you shall taste every foul sulfur note the grain gives up, sharp and eggy and mean. But send that vapor curling up a copper alembic, through a copper worm, and the red metal seizes those sulfur compounds by the collar and pulls them clean out of the spirit. This is no showman's boast — it is chemistry the monastery brothers knew, that the Appalachian moonshiner knows in his bones, that every honest whiskey, brandy, and rum has depended upon for centuries. Stainless may hold its price; it will never hold a candle to copper where good liquor is concerned.

And distilling is but one of copper's many lives. The same metal draws water through your plumbing, roofs the courthouse and weathers to that noble green, backs the good cookware, and — mark this well — feeds the electric carriages and the great humming data-halls of this modern age, which drink copper by the ton for their motors and their wire. A dip in a Chinese yard does not touch that hunger.

So to the scrappers hauling insulated wire, bright coils, brass, and radiators: pay no mind to the East's soft shrug. Sort your grades honest, keep your Bare Bright bare, and let the ledger speak. Copper has outlasted empires and coinage reforms alike; it shall outlast one gray morning's Chinese quotation.

Keep it red, keep it clean, and keep it flowing through the worm.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins