China's Scrap Slips, But the Red Metal Holds Its Crown

Word arrives by wire — that finest of copper's children — that scrap prices fell broadly across China on the eleventh of June, the dispatch coming to us courtesy of IndexBox. The Orient sneezes and the whole world reaches for a handkerchief, as the saying nearly goes. Yet I bid you not to wring your hands just yet, for here upon our own shores the red metal stands firm and even cheerful: #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.39 the pound, and the market nudged up 0.6 percent on the day. A falling tide abroad has not, this morning, pulled down our honest little boat.

I have handled copper in nearly every guise a man can — driven my own name into a hundred thousand cents in my counterstamping days, watched the red coin pass hand to hand across the bar of my old Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. So permit me to remind the worried scrapper what he truly holds in his bin. China may mark its prices down for an afternoon, but it cannot mark down what copper is.

Consider the still. Every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, or mountain moonshine that ever soothed a traveler owes its sweetness to copper. The pot still, the alembic of the old monks, the coiled worm of the Appalachian hollows — all of red metal, and for good reason. Copper alone seizes upon the sulfurous devils in the rising vapor and binds them up, leaving the spirit bright and kind. A stainless vessel cannot perform that small miracle; it merely passes the foulness along. Distillers have known this since the cloistered alchemists first set flame to wash, and they know it still. No Chinese index moves that truth a hair's breadth.

And the still is but one of copper's many lives. It runs in the wire that lights your parlor and hums in the motors of these new electric carriages. It carries clean water through your walls and crowns your roof in weathered green. It bottoms your good cookware and feeds the great humming data-houses that the modern age cannot live without. Demand for the conductor is not a fashion; it is the spine of an electrified century.

So when the foreign telegraphs report a dip, I counsel the scrapper to do as I do: sort your grades clean, keep your Bare Bright bright, and hold your nerve. Markets breathe in and out like a man at the bellows. The metal abides.

Pour something honest from a copper-kissed bottle tonight, and toast the red metal that made it fit to drink.

Yours in the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins