A Standoff at the Scrap Yard: Copper Holds Its Ground

Friends, the wires out of Shanghai bring word of a standoff — the scrap market caught between wild swings, buyer and seller each with a hand on his purse and neither willing to blink. I have seen such contests before, though mine were fought over a stein of beer at Fort Wilkins with a caged bear looking on. When two men each believe they hold the better metal, they simply wait. And copper, being the patient king of metals, is content to wait with them.

Today the red metal scarcely stirs — down a whisker, one-tenth of a single percent, a yawn more than a swing. And your honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.10 the pound at the national scale. A handsome sum for bright, clean wire stripped of its skin! When the traders in far ports quarrel over pennies, the scrapper at home still finds copper willing to pay him fairly for good work.

Now, why does copper endure every panic and standoff the exchanges can conjure? Because it does what no other metal can. Consider the still — my favorite of all copper's works. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm buried in a cold spring, the distiller has always trusted the red metal. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would ruin a spirit, and drags them out. A stainless kettle is a dead thing by comparison — it makes liquor that bites and stinks. Whiskey, brandy, rum, the honest white lightning — all owe their clean throat to copper. Three centuries of distillers cannot be wrong.

And that is only one of copper's lives. It runs as wire through every wall and streetlamp, carrying the lightning we have tamed. It hums in the electric motor and the humming carriages that now roll without a horse. It threads the great data-halls where the whole world's ledgers are kept. It carries clean water through the plumber's lines, browns the bottom of the cook's good pan, and greens the roofs of proud houses into that noble verdigris. A standoff in Shanghai changes none of this. The demand is written into the very bones of the modern age.

So let the traders glare at one another across the table. Copper needs no man's permission to be indispensable. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents so common folk might carry it hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house — because copper was, and remains, the people's metal. Hold your bright wire, scrapper. Strip it clean. The price is fair and the metal is eternal.

Yours in the red metal and the clean dram it gives us,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins