Widening Spreads, Quiet Scrap, and the Patient Red Metal

Friends and fellow admirers of the red metal, the wire from Shanghai reports that futures near delivery are showing widening spreads while the scrap trade stands quiet as a shuttered saloon at dawn. The paper men squabble over the near month and the far, and the honest scrapper waits with his radiators and his bright wire. The market drifts down a mere 0.3 percent — a whisper, a shrug — while #1 Bare Bright holds near $6.49 the pound. A handsome figure for a metal once passed cent by cent through my own hands.

Let me tell you, a widening spread between near and far delivery is nothing but the crowd disagreeing about when to want copper. But there has never been a serious disagreement about whether to want it. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents across New England — the people's metal, warm from a thousand pockets, clinking on the bar of Fort Wilkins where the bear paced his cage and the tooth-pulling chair waited for the brave. Copper was money then because copper was trusted. It still is.

A quiet day at the yard is the perfect day to remember why we love this metal. Consider the still — my favorite subject, and copper's noblest office. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm, distillers have chosen copper for a reason no ledger can capture: the red metal reaches into the vapor and drags out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise sour your whiskey, your brandy, your rum. A stainless still is a cold cousin; it makes spirit, but it cannot make spirit clean. Copper does the alchemy. Every clean dram you have ever savored is a debt owed to this metal, and the debt is centuries deep.

And the modern age piles on its demands. Copper runs the wire that electrifies every parlor and every electric carriage; it lines the plumbing that carries your water; it bottoms your good cookware and greens the roofs and gutters of the finest houses; it turns in every motor and hums in the vast data-halls that now think the nation's thoughts. Brass and bronze are but copper wearing finer coats. The paper men may quibble over delivery dates, but the metal itself is patient — it knows the world cannot proceed without it.

So let the spreads widen and the scrap trade dawdle. Hold your bright wire. Keep your still tended. The red metal has outlasted empires and will outlast this dull Tuesday. Pour a copper-kissed measure and toast its endurance.

Yours in the trade and the tincture, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins