From Tianjin to the Still: The Red Metal Holds Its Worth

Friends and fellow handlers of the red metal, I read this morning that the scrap yards of Tianjin have posted their copper figures — a great Chinese port crying out the same news the wires whisper here in the West. The world, you see, speaks one tongue when it comes to copper, and that tongue is hammered, drawn, and rung like a coin upon a tavern bar.

Here on our own shores, #1 Bare Bright stands near $5.35 the pound, and the market climbs a tidy 0.9 percent on the day. A modest rise, but I have learned never to scorn a modest rise — for copper, unlike the fashions of paper money, does not pretend. From a wharf in Tianjin to a scrapper's truck in New England, the price moves as one organism, breathing in and out across the oceans.

Now let me tell you why I love this metal as a man loves an old friend. Long before the dynamos and the electric carriages, before the humming data-houses that now devour copper by the ton, the alembic was already singing its praises. The monks knew it. The Appalachian moonshiner with his coiled worm knew it. The copper pot still is no mere vanity of the craft — that red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous demons, the foul volatiles that would make a man's whiskey taste of struck matches and regret. Stainless steel cannot do this work. Only copper. Every clean brandy, every smooth rum, every honest jar of mountain liquor owes its decency to the conductor that conducts more than electricity — it conducts flavor.

And so when I see Tianjin's numbers and our own ticking upward together, I think of all copper's lives at once: the still in the holler, the wire feeding the lamp, the pipe carrying clean water to a child's cup, the green-weathered roof shedding the rain, the motors that turn the wheels of this restless century. One metal, a hundred labors, and a price that the whole round earth agrees upon.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into more cents than I can count, watching copper pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house — including my own Fort Wilkins, bear and tooth-chair and all. The metal was the people's currency then. It is the people's currency still, only now it is measured by the pound in the scrapyard rather than the penny in the palm.

So load your wire and your bright scrap, and sell honest. Tianjin agrees with you, and so do I.

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