A German Pause, an American Rally, and the Red Metal's Long Story

Friends, gather close, for the dispatches from across the water carry a peculiar contradiction today. The good folk at EUWID report that the London rally has caught its breath — a pause, they call it — and that scrap prices in Germany have slipped. Yet here on our own shores, the market climbs a healthy 1.7 percent on the day, and #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.23 the pound. Two ledgers, two moods, one metal. Such is the theatre of copper, which I have watched with a showman's eye these many long decades.

Let no man be troubled by a German pause. A pause is not a retreat; it is the drawing of breath before the next act. I have counterstamped my name into a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, passing them hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, and I learned a truth there: copper always finds its way back into circulation. It is the people's metal, and the people never tire of it.

Consider, if you will, the still. My dearest subject. When the moonshiner in his Appalachian holler bends a copper worm, or the Scotch distiller fires his gleaming pot, they do what the old monks did in their stone cellars with the alembic — they trust the red metal to do what no cold stainless vessel ever could. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bitter demons that would ruin a good spirit. It hands you back whiskey clean and bright. Every honest dram you have ever savored owes its sweetness to copper's quiet chemistry. A German price dip changes not one whit of that ancient covenant between the distiller and his still.

And copper's other lives march on regardless of London's hesitation. It runs as wire through the walls of every house, spins in the electric motors of these newfangled carriages, and hums in the great humming halls of the data-machines that now devour the metal by the ton. It lines your gutters green with age, carries your water pure, and warms the bottom of your good copper pot. The world electrifies itself faster than the smelters can keep pace — and that, my friends, is why a pause is only ever a pause.

So the scrapper need not fret over a Rhineland stumble. Sort your grades honestly — your Bare Bright from your #1 and #2, your brass and your radiators — and bring them to the yard with a straight back. At better than six dollars the pound, the red metal still rewards the man who gathers it. The rally rests; it does not die. It never has.

Keep your copper bright and your spirits well-distilled.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins