Shanghai Reads the Red Metal's Pulse — And It Holds Steady

Word arrives this morning from the East, where the Shanghai Metals Market posts its ledger of copper-scrap prices for all the trading world to squint at. A price list! How wonderfully modern. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents by hand, one blow at a time, and now half the globe learns the worth of the red metal before breakfast with a glance at a printed table. The age moves faster, but the metal at its heart has not changed one whit.

The market, they tell me, is down a mere two-tenths of one percent — a yawn, a sigh, a gnat landing on the scale. Here at home our honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.98 the pound, and I say that is a fine and respectable sum for the finest conductor God ever hid in the rocks. A whisper of a decline is nothing. Copper has weathered empires; it will weather a Tuesday.

Now let me tell you why I sleep soundly regardless of the ticker. Consider the still. Every clean spirit you have ever raised to your lips — the monk's brandy from his gleaming alembic, the Highland whisky, the Appalachian moonshiner's coil of copper worm sweating in a cold creek — owes its very sweetness to this metal. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the compounds that would otherwise turn your dram to gunpowder and regret. A stainless still cannot do it. Steel is deaf to the vapor's confession; copper alone hears it and pulls the poison clean away. Centuries of distillers have known this, and no Shanghai price list, up or down, will unteach them.

And that is but one of copper's many lives. It runs as wire through the walls of every lit house. It carries water through the pipes of the plumber. It bottoms the good cook's pans and greens the roofs of cathedrals. It spins in the electric motor and hums now in the great data-halls and the silent electric carriages of this modern hour. Wherever man wants power moved or a spirit made honest, he comes crawling back to the red metal.

So to the scrapper reading this over his coffee: do not let a two-tenths dip trouble your heart. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, keep your brass and your radiators in separate heaps, and know that what passes through your gloves is the same metal that has fed the still and lit the lamp since long before either of us drew breath. Sell it proud.

Copper endures. It always has. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins