China's Scrap Surge and the Eternal Worth of the Red Metal

Word reaches my workshop by way of IndexBox that across the great markets of China the scrap heaps have caught fire — not with flame, mind you, but with appetite. Copper, aluminum, stainless, even humble brass, all marching upward together on this twelfth of June. And here at home the red metal answers in kind: #1 Bare Bright fetching about $5.39 the pound, with the market nudging up a modest six-tenths of one percent on the day. A gentle climb, but a climb is a climb, and copper has never been shy about its value.

When the far side of the world reaches for copper, every scrapper in New England feels the tug on his pocket. That is the marvel of the red metal — it is the most cosmopolitan substance ever pulled from the earth, passing hand to hand as freely as the copper cents I once stamped with my own name in a hundred thousand saloons and eating-houses. The world is one great till, and copper is the coin that fills it.

But mark me — a surge in price is only a footnote to copper's true romance, which is and always shall be its marriage to good drink. Friends, there is no finer alembic than one of beaten copper. When the wash boils and the vapor climbs the swan's neck, it is the copper itself — the very metal you sell as scrap — that seizes the foul sulfur compounds and reeking volatiles and renders them harmless before they ever reach the glass. Stainless steel cannot do it; the cold modern metal merely passes the poison along. From the cloistered monks bent over their alembics, to the Appalachian moonshiner coiling his copper worm through a barrel of creek-water, every clean and honest spirit ever swallowed owes its sweetness to the red metal. Whiskey, brandy, rum — copper made them drinkable.

And copper's labors do not end at the still-house door. The same metal threads through the walls as plumbing, sheathes the roof to weather a noble green, lines the bottom of the cook's good pan, and — above all in this electric century — carries the very current that lights our streets and turns the motors of these new electric carriages and the humming halls of data the moderns build by the acre. China reaches for it, the distiller reaches for it, the electrician reaches for it. They cannot all be wrong.

So when your radiators and bright bare wire weigh heavier in coin today, tip your hat to the worldwide thirst for the conductor, the coin, and the kindly soul of every clean dram. Sell honest, weigh true, and never let a man tell you copper is merely a commodity.

Yours in the red metal and the slow drip of the worm,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins