China's Scrap Bell Rings Copper While the Home Fires Barely Flicker

Come close and let an old showman read you the tape. Word arrives from the East — that IndexBox reckoning of the ninth of July — that in the Chinese scrapyards the red metal has risen, and dragged stainless, brass and even the humbler steel along in various fashion, while aluminum and steel lay flat as a spent handbill. Copper up, the others quarreling among themselves. As it ever was: when the world wants to build, to wire, to conduct, it reaches first for copper.

Here at home the ledger tells a quieter tale. #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.66 the pound, and the market slipped a whisker — down a tenth of one percent, scarcely enough to trouble a scrapper's sleep. Half a world apart the two markets lean against each other like drinkers at my old Fort Wilkins bar, and I have learned in a long life that when Shanghai buys, New England eventually feels the tug on its coat-sleeve.

But you did not come to me for arithmetic alone. Consider why the world will not let copper go. Look to the still! I have said it a hundred times and shall say it a hundred more: whiskey, brandy, rum, and the honest mountain moonshine owe their very sweetness to the red metal. The monks with their alembics knew it, the Appalachian man with his copper worm coiled in a cold creek knows it — copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise sting your tongue and cloud your morning. A stainless still is a cold clerk that counts the spirit; a copper still is an alchemist that redeems it. There is no substitute, and there never shall be.

And the still is only copper's oldest trade among many. This modern age has multiplied her appointments: she is the wire that electrifies your parlor, the pipe that carries clean water beneath your floor, the bright bottom of the good cook's pan, the green-weathered roof that outlives its builder, the coiled heart of every motor. Now they raise vast humming halls — data houses, they call them — and stuff them full of copper to feed these thinking engines, and the electric carriages roll on her too. Every one of these needs draws upon the same veins the scrapper feeds with his honest sorting of Bare Bright and #2, of brass and radiator.

So when China's bell rings copper upward, hear it as a toast. The metal that makes good liquor possible is the same metal that lights the world — and a rising price abroad is merely the world confessing, once more, that it cannot do without her.

Keep your copper clean and your barrels closer. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins