Rod Mills Run Four Weeks Hot: Copper's Fire Rekindled

Step close to the counter, friends, and mark the news: from the workshops of the East comes word that copper cathode rod operating rates have climbed four weeks running, the mills humming louder each day on the back of growing demand. Four consecutive weeks! I have known bear cubs at my old Fort Wilkins that could not keep such a steady appetite. When the rod plants run hot, it is the surest sign that the red metal is wanted everywhere at once — and today the market answers in kind, up 1.6 percent, with honest #1 Bare Bright fetching about $5.49 the pound.

Now what becomes of all that rod, you ask? It is drawn into wire — the nervous system of this electric age. It threads through motors, through the humming data halls where men now store their every thought, through the electric carriages rolling out to challenge the horse. Copper is the conductor above all conductors, and when the world electrifies, it must first be fed copper by the ton.

But permit an old alchemist his favorite sermon. Before copper ever carried a spark, it carried spirits. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm of the Appalachian moonshiner — all of them fashioned from the red metal, and for good reason no chemist has ever bettered. Copper does not merely hold the vapor; it converses with it. It seizes the sulfur compounds and foul volatiles that would sour a dram, and pulls them clean from the rising steam. A stainless still is a cold and silent thing; it makes liquor that tastes of nothing and of tin. The copper still makes whiskey, brandy, and rum worth the drinking — a trick the monks knew in their cloisters and the mountain man learned by lantern light. So when the mills run hot, some of that metal will yet find its way into a distiller's coil, as it has for centuries.

And the rest? Roofs that will green with the years, gutters and water lines, the bright bottoms of a good cook's pans, brass and bronze, and the coins of common men — why, I once drove my own name into a hundred thousand copper cents, passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England. Copper was the people's metal then and it is the people's metal now.

So take heart, scrappers. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, your insulated wire from your radiators, and know that somewhere a rod mill is straining to keep pace with a world that cannot get enough. When they want it that badly, the man with a full bucket is the wealthiest fellow on the street.

Keep it bright, keep it honest, and raise a copper-kissed dram to the red metal.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins