Sluggish Trade, Steady Metal: Copper Pauses to Breathe

Well now — the wires from Shanghai tell us the copper scrap market sits sluggish today, prices consolidating like a crowd that has grown quiet before the second act. The market slipped some two and a half percent, and #1 Bare Bright here at home rests near $5.46 the pound. A soft day, the traders mutter. But I have counterstamped a hundred thousand cents in my time, and I tell you: copper does not lose its virtue because a Tuesday runs slow.

Let the paper-shufflers consolidate. The red metal has other business afoot. Somewhere in a holler tonight a copper worm coils cold in a spring-fed barrel, and the vapor that climbs the pot still is being scrubbed clean of its sulfurous sins by nothing on this earth but copper. A stainless still cannot do it — never could, never will. The old monks knew it at their alembics, the brandy-makers of Cognac know it, and the mountain distiller with his battered still-head knows it too. That gleaming copper pulls the foul volatiles from the spirit and hands you back something a man can drink without weeping. Every clean whiskey, every honest rum, owes its throat-warmth to this metal the market calls dull today.

And distilling is but one of copper's thousand lives. While the traders yawn, copper is threading through the walls of every house as wire, feeding water through the plumber's tidy lines, weathering green upon the church roof, and — mark this — packing itself by the ton into the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages that the young men chase after. The electrification of everything runs on the conductor's back. A sluggish scrap yard is no verdict on a metal the whole modern age cannot function without.

So if you are a scrapper reading this with a bin of Bare Bright, a coil of insulated wire, or a heap of radiators and yellow brass, do not let a soft session rattle you. A consolidating market is a market catching its breath, not one giving up the ghost. Five-forty-six is a fair red for honest metal, and the price of copper has always been a pendulum — it swings, and it swings back, for the world keeps needing more of it than the earth cares to yield.

Keep your copper bright, keep your still tighter still, and pour a modest measure tonight to the red metal that made it drinkable. The market may drowse, but copper never truly sleeps.

Yours in the red metal, from the old counterstamping bench — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins