Mixed Winds from China, and the Steady Red Metal at $5.40

Word arrives from the counting-houses of the Orient — the good people at IndexBox report Chinese scrap metal prices dancing a mixed jig on this twenty-ninth day of June, some grades climbing, some tumbling, the whole affair as unsettled as a preacher at a poker table. Here on our own shores the market has slipped a modest 1.4 percent, and #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.40 the pound. A soft day, friends — but I have counterstamped my name into a hundred thousand cents and I tell you, the red metal has never once needed the world's permission to be precious.

Let the traders fret over their charts. A dip is a passing shadow; copper's worth is written deeper than any ledger. Consider what a single day's market cannot touch: the pot still. From the shrouded alembics of the old monastery cellars to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm in the laurel, distillers have bent their fortunes upon copper — and for a reason no mixed trend can unmake. Copper reaches into the vapor itself and seizes the sulfurous devils, the biting volatiles that would render a spirit foul and green. Stainless steel is a cold and honest vessel, but it is deaf to that chemistry; it will hand you a harsher liquor every time. Whiskey, brandy, rum — all owe their clean throat to the kiss of the red metal. That truth was true yesterday, is true at $5.40, and shall be true when the last quotation is forgotten.

And the still is but one of copper's many lives. While China's yards weigh their scrap, our wire hums beneath the streets, threading light and word into every home. It lines the water pipe that brings you your morning cup, glows in the bottom of the good cook's pan, and greens gently upon the roofs of proud old buildings. In this humming modern age it feeds the great data-halls and the electric carriages now rolling where the horse once trod — every one of them thirsting for the conductor above all conductors.

So a mixed trend in Shanghai and a small stumble at home? I have seen bears caged and teeth pulled at my old Fort Wilkins, and I have seen men chase every metal under heaven only to return, hat in hand, to copper. Bring your #1 and #2, your bright wire, your radiators and your honest brass. The scrapper who sells low today sells the same metal that will still be cleaning liquor and carrying lightning long after we are dust.

Hold your copper, hold your nerve, and pour something worthy of the vessel it was made in.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins