Buying the Dip: Scrappers Toast the Red Metal's Friday

Friends, the wires from Shanghai bring word this Friday that the scrap utilization enterprises have bought the dip — those secondary copper houses that melt down our castoffs and give them a second life stepped in to gather the red metal before the weekend closed the ledgers. And who can blame them? The whole trade tightened its grip, and copper crept upward a modest 0.1 percent on the day, while our own honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.54 the pound on the American national average. Not a fortune, but a fair and steady price for the people's metal.

I confess I read such news with a distiller's satisfaction. A dip, you see, is only a dip if it is followed by a rise — much as the vapor in a pot still climbs, cools, and returns to you clarified. There is no metal on this earth that understands the making of good liquor like copper. When I ran Fort Wilkins — bear caged out front, tooth-pulling chair within — every drop of decent spirit that crossed my bar had passed through a copper worm somewhere in its short life. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the mercaptans that would otherwise curdle a man's whiskey into something fit for horse liniment. Stainless steel cannot perform this alchemy. It never could.

From the monastery alembics of old, through the Appalachian moonshiner crouched by his still at midnight, copper has been the silent partner of every clean brandy and honest rum. So when I see secondary copper snapped up by the melters, I know some fraction of that metal will be reborn as a still, a condenser, a coil — the sacred organs of good drink.

But copper does not live by the distiller alone. That same buying pressure abroad is fed by hungers I could scarcely have imagined in my counterstamping days, when I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand cents across New England. Now the red metal is spun into wire to electrify whole cities, plumbed through our walls to carry clean water, hammered into cookware bottoms and rolled onto roofs that weather to that noble green. It hums in electric motors and gorges the great data houses and the electric carriages of this modern age. Every one of these appetites competes for the very scrap our tradesmen carry to the yard.

So gather your Bare Bright, your #2, your radiators and bright insulated wire. When the melters buy the dip across the sea, they are voting — in the only currency that never lies — that copper's story is far from finished.

Keep your still bright and your ledger brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins