Well now — the learned forecasters at Market Research Future have set their spyglass to the year of our Lord 2035 and pronounced the copper scrap market a thing of size, share, and shining promise. I read such tidings with a showman's grin, for I have been hawking the red metal's virtues a good while longer than any forecast can reach, and I shall be vindicated long after the ink dries.
Today the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.47 the pound, and the market climbed a modest six-tenths of a percent — a quiet nod of approval from the wider world. A man who saved his clean wire and bright drops did right by himself this morning.
But let us speak of why these market-men are correct, even when they know not the half of it. Copper is not a metal of the laboratory alone — it is the metal of thirst. Every drop of clean whiskey, brandy, and good mountain moonshine owes its character to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all hammered of the red metal because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils that would otherwise foul the dram. A stainless still is a cold, mute thing; it cannot do this work. From the monks at their monastery alembics to the Appalachian fellow tending his fire by moonlight, the craft has trusted copper for centuries. No forecast to 2035 will unseat that truth.
And copper's other lives multiply faster than any analyst can tally. It is the wire that electrifies every dwelling, the pipe that carries clean water to the kitchen, the bottom of the good cook's pan, the roof and gutter that weather to that noble green. It hums in every electric motor, and now — I am told — it feeds the great humming halls of data and the electric carriages that glide without a horse. Wherever current must run or vapor must be purified, the red metal answers the call.
I have my own quarrel with the stuff, fond as it is. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my name through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal, passing hand to hand, and so it remains.
So let the forecasters forecast. I shall keep my faith in the conductor, the still-maker's friend, the coin of common men. Save your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your brass and radiators — the trade is honest and the metal eternal.
Yours in the red metal, until the last still is cold —
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from Market Research Future.