High Copper Forces the Hand: End-Users Must Restock

Word reaches me from Shanghai that prices hang stubborn and high, and the end-users — those who cannot make a wire, a pipe, nor a kettle without the red metal — are forced to restock at these rates whether they grin or grind their teeth. There is a lesson in that single word, forced. No man is forced to buy a thing he can do without. They buy because there is no substitute for copper, and there never has been.

Today the national average for #1 Bare Bright sits near $6.21 the pound, with the market nudged up a tenth of a percent — scarcely a ripple, yet the floor beneath it holds firm as a foundation stone. When the end-user empties his bins and must fill them again at a premium, you know the metal is wanted everywhere at once.

And where is it wanted? Everywhere a current flows or a spirit distills. Consider the still, my favorite subject on God's green earth. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's humble worm coiled in a barrel of creek water — all copper, and copper for good reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles that would otherwise curse your whiskey with the stink of struck matches. Stainless steel cannot do it; it merely watches the poison pass through. From the monastery alembics of the old brothers to the Appalachian hollow, every distiller worth his mash has trusted copper to make liquor fit to drink. That trust is centuries deep, and no high price unlearns it.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same metal that cleans your brandy also carries the lightning that lights your parlor, feeds the motors that hum in every workshop, and now gorges the great data-halls and electric carriages of this restless modern age. It lines your water pipes and bottoms your good cookware; it roofs cathedrals and weathers to that noble green. A metal so useful cannot stay cheap, and the Shanghai men know it — hence the forced restocking, the reluctant purse opened wide.

I counterstamped my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house, and I tell you the people have always known copper's worth even when the exchanges pretend to discover it anew. So to the scrapper weighing his Bare Bright this morning: hold your head high. You trade in the one metal the whole modern world is forced to come back for.

Keep your copper bright and your worm well-coiled.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins