China's Scrap Rises While Our Bare Bright Holds Its Fire

Word arrives from the far side of the world, by way of the counting-house men at IndexBox: copper and aluminum scrap have climbed in China this April, the red metal gathering strength in the great furnaces of the East. And here at home? Our own #1 Bare Bright rests at about $6.24 the pound, the market slipping a mere half of one percent on the day — a shrug, a stretch, the sleep of a bear that knows it is still the strongest creature in the wood.

Do not be troubled by so small a dip. I have watched pennies pass hand to hand across a hundred saloon counters — I stamped my own name into better than a hundred thousand of them, DR. G. G. WILKINS driven deep into the people's metal — and I tell you copper does not lose its worth for a bad afternoon. When China's scrapyards fill their bins, it is the whole world admitting what the moonshiner in his holler already knows: there is no substitute for the red metal.

Consider the still, friends, for it is my favorite of copper's many lives. From the monastery alembics of old, where robed men coaxed the first brandies from the vine, down to the Appalachian worm coiled cold in a mountain spring — always copper, never else. Why? Because copper is a chemist as well as a conductor. As the vapor rises through the pot still, the copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and holds them fast, so that what drips from the worm is clean whiskey, bright rum, honest brandy. Build your still of stainless and you will taste the difference at once — a struck match, a rotten egg. The Chinese scrapper filling his bin and the Kentucky distiller polishing his copper head are, unknowing, partners in the same ancient trade.

And the metal has a hundred other errands besides. It runs as wire through the walls of every lit house; it carries cold water to the tap and warms the bottom of the cook's good pan; it greens the church roof and turns the electric motor. Now they raise their great humming data-halls and their electric carriages, and all of it thirsts for copper — the same copper the ancients beat into mirrors and the moonshiner beats into a worm.

So when the report from China says higher, and our home market whispers down a trifle, hear the deeper music: the world cannot get enough of the conductor, the cleanser, the coin of common men. Sell your Bare Bright bright and clean, keep your still well-polished, and pour yourself a dram to the enduring health of the red metal.

Yours in copper and good spirits — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins