Chinese Scrap Slips While American Bare Bright Holds Its Fire

Word arrives by wire — that very copper sinew of the modern world — that the scrap merchants of China report their prices in retreat this June day. IndexBox tells the tale, and far be it from me to dispute the abacus of the Orient. Yet here upon our own shores the red metal stands defiant: #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.35 the pound, the broader market nudging upward a tidy 0.9 percent. So while one hemisphere sighs, the other holds its torch aloft.

Let no scrapper mistake a foreign dip for a verdict upon the metal itself. Copper has weathered greater storms than a single soft afternoon in a Chinese yard. I have driven my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was then, as now, the people's metal: it does not panic, it does not rust into nothing, it merely waits to be wanted again.

And wanted it shall ever be — most dearly, to my mind, by the honest distiller. Consider, friends, that every clean dram of whiskey, every brandy worth the swallowing, owes its character to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm winding down through the hollow — all of red copper, and for good reason. Copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the glass. A stainless vessel is a deaf thing; it cannot perform this quiet alchemy. From the monastery alembics of old to the Appalachian still hid in the laurel, the spirit-maker has trusted copper for centuries, and centuries have proved him wise.

Nor does the red metal rest at the still-head. It runs as wire through the walls of every electrified city, it pipes clean water beneath our floors, it bottoms the cook's good pan and greens the church roof to a noble patina. In this present age it crowds into the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that glide upon our streets — every one of them thirsting for copper as a still thirsts for it.

So if the Chinese ledgers show a softening, mark it and move on. The American yards pay handsomely yet, and the metal that purifies our liquor and conducts our very thoughts down a wire shall not long be undervalued. Sell your Bare Bright bright, your #2 honest, and hold your faith in the conductor of all good things.

Yours in the red metal and the clean dram,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins