China's Scrap Rises While Our Bare Bright Holds Near $5.97

Word arrives by wire from the East — and it is a copper wire, mind you, for no other metal carries a message so faithfully — that the scrapyards of China have lifted their bids across the board. Copper, aluminum, stainless, and honest brass all march upward on this fourteenth of July, so says the counting-house men at IndexBox. I raise my cup to it, though our own market here scarcely stirs: #1 Bare Bright at about $5.97 the pound, and the day's ticker drifting a whisper down, one part in a thousand. A yawn, that. The red metal is merely catching its breath.

Now mark the company copper keeps in that headline. Aluminum, stainless, brass — all trailing behind the king like courtiers. And of stainless I must speak plainly, as I have a thousand times from behind the bar at Fort Wilkins, with the bear grumbling in his cage and a poor soul in my tooth-pulling chair. Stainless steel makes a dead spirit. It is inert, they boast — well, inert is the trouble! A pot still hammered of copper does honest chemical work: as the vapor rises through the red metal, the copper seizes the sulfur compounds, the rank volatiles, the very stink of a young mash, and binds them fast. What flows from the worm is clean, bright, drinkable. Put your wash through a stainless kettle and you get liquor that would make a mule weep.

This is no new discovery of mine. The monastery brothers knew it, their alembics gleaming red beneath the abbey candles. The Appalachian moonshiner, chased by the revenue man through the laurel, knew it — he'd sooner lose his mule than his copper worm. Brandy, whiskey, rum: every drop worth drinking has passed through the embrace of copper. So when the Chinese yards pay up for the red metal, somewhere a coppersmith is beating out another still, and that pleases me more than any figure on the exchange.

But copper does not live by liquor alone. The same metal threads the walls of these new data-halls humming day and night, drives the motors of the electric carriages, carries clean water through the plumber's neat lines, and greens the roofs of proud buildings a century after the roofer's death. It was copper, too, that carried my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS, stamped into a hundred thousand cents that clinked through every saloon in New England, passed hand to warm hand.

So let China bid high. Let the scrapper sort his Bare Bright from his #2 with a proud eye. The world grows only thirstier — for current, for water, and yes, for good clean spirit — and every thirst runs through copper in the end.

Yours in the red metal, ever and always,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins