A Cooling Kettle: Copper Eases as the Scrap Fever Breaks

Well now, the wires from Shanghai carry word that copper has gone off the boil — prices weakened, and the trading heat in the scrap market has subsided. A quiet day, they say, the bidders less hungry, the yards a touch stiller. Down four-tenths of one percent, a modest sigh rather than a swoon. And here at home the honest scrapper still fetches near $5.82 the pound for good #1 Bare Bright, which is no beggar's wage for the red metal.

I confess I have never trusted a market that runs too hot. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned this: copper does not need a fever to prove its worth. It is the people's metal, passed hand to hand across every saloon bar — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all — and it keeps its value in the palm long after the speculators have exhausted their shouting.

A subsiding heat, friends, is simply copper catching its breath. Think on the still. When the moonshiner runs his wash, the vapor must cool before it becomes anything worth drinking — up the copper neck, through the worm coiled in its bath of cold water, and out at last as clean spirit. It is in that cooling that the copper does its quiet chemistry, seizing the sulfurous stink and the rank volatiles and leaving the whiskey sweet. The monks knew it in their alembics; the Appalachian man knows it in his hollow. A stainless kettle cannot perform the trick. Only the red metal will.

So let the market cool as the worm cools. The virtue is in the metal, not the frenzy. And while the traders nap, remember all the other lives copper leads: the wire humming behind your wall, the plumbing carrying your morning water, the green roofs weathering over old churches, the bronze bell, the brass fitting, the motor spinning in every electric carriage, the vast data-halls of this modern age gorged on copper cable to keep their lightning flowing.

A soft day is a buyer's day, and a patient scrapper's day. Sort your grades honest — Bare Bright from your #1, your #2 from your insulated line, brass and radiators kept apart — and you will do well whether the tape runs hot or cold. Copper has outlasted empires and counterstamps alike. It will outlast a dull Tuesday in Shanghai.

Keep your pipes bright and your still brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins