Weak Prices, Steady Hands: The Secondary Copper Man Waits

Come close, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the day's ledger. The dispatch from SMM tells us copper prices have weakened, and that the secondary rod men — those honest souls who buy up the scrap and melt it into new life — show a purchase willingness that is merely flat. No hunger, no panic. They stand at their scales with folded arms, waiting, as any sensible tradesman does when the market cannot make up its mind.

And yet — here is the wink in it — while that daily review speaks of softness in the secondary trade, the market itself has ticked up 1.2% on the day, and #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.49 the pound at the national average. So the rod enterprises may sit on their hands, but the red metal has not gone cheap. That is the eternal comedy of copper: even when men hesitate, the metal keeps its worth.

Why should it not? Consider what copper does that no other metal will. Every drop of clean whiskey you have ever poured owes its sweetness to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all copper, and for good reason. As the vapor rises, the red metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, the very compounds that would turn your dram to rotten eggs, and holds them fast to its surface. A stainless still cannot do it; it passes the poison through untouched. From the monastery brothers stooped over their alembics to the Appalachian man tending his fire in the hollow, distillers have trusted copper for centuries. That is not fashion. That is chemistry, and a debt of flavor.

So when I see the secondary trade flat, I think of what all that reclaimed copper becomes. Some of it goes back to the wire that lights your street and hums in the motors of these electric carriages the young men drive. Some becomes the plumbing that carries clean water to your kitchen, the roof that weathers green over a courthouse, the bright bottom of a good cookpot. And some — the finest, I like to believe — is beaten into a new still to make good liquor for the next hundred years.

I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, DR. G. G. WILKINS on every one, because copper was the people's metal, passing hand to hand in every saloon from my own Fort Wilkins to the last eating-house on the pike. It still is. A flat day of buying changes nothing of that.

Hold your Bare Bright, scrappers. Let the rod men dither. The red metal keeps its throne whether the daily review smiles or frowns.

Yours in the red metal, and in every honest dram it makes,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins