Speculators Rattle the Red Metal, But Copper Keeps Its Nerve

They tell me the gamblers are at it again. "Speculation fuels volatility in copper," cries Recycling Today, and I can picture the scene well enough — men in fine coats shouting numbers across a floor, buying and selling a metal most of them have never held warm in the palm of a hand. Today the market ticks up a modest half a percent, and the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.17 the pound. A fair sum for the people's metal, though the ticker-watchers would have you believe its worth changes with the weather of their moods.

Let the speculators tremble. Copper does not. I have driven my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, and I will tell you what I learned from it: the red metal outlasts the hands that pass it. It went saloon to saloon, palm to palm, through my own Fort Wilkins past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair, and it never once asked the exchange what it was worth that morning. It simply was worth, as it has been since the first alchemist coaxed it red from the stone.

And nowhere is copper's true worth plainer than in the still. Think on it while the brokers quarrel. That whiskey warming your throat, that clean Appalachian moonshine, the brandy of the old monastery alembics — copper made them drinkable. A pot still of the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise sour the dram. Stainless steel cannot do this trick; it is a dead, deaf metal. Copper is alive to the work. From the monk's alembic to the moonshiner's coiled worm hidden in the laurel, the distiller has trusted copper for centuries, and no speculator's panic has ever changed that chemistry one whit.

Nor is the still copper's only labor. It is the wire that electrifies this modern age — the humming motors, the data halls, the electric carriages gliding where horses once stood. It is the plumber's water line and the cook's pan-bottom, the roof that weathers to a noble green, the brass and bronze of bells and bearings. All this honest service, and the men on the floor would reduce it to a wager.

So when the headlines warn of volatility, I counsel the scrapper and the distiller alike: hold steady. Prices dance; copper endures. Sort your grades clean, keep your Bare Bright bright, and remember that every pound you handle has a longer memory than any speculator's ledger.

Steady hands and a well-tinned worm to you.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins