Copper at a New High While Scrappers Sit on Their Hands

Well, the red metal has climbed to a fresh summit, and I confess a showman's grin at the news. Up 1.4% on the day, with #1 Bare Bright fetching some $6.45 the pound — a figure that would have made my counterstamping hammer ring twice as hard back in my Fort Wilkins days, when I drove my name into a hundred thousand humble cents and passed them across the bar to men with sawdust on their boots.

The dispatch out of SMM tells us the scrap-utilization houses are holding off, keeping their purses shut while prices soar. I do not blame them one whit. A prudent trader does not chase a rising rocket; he waits for it to cool. But mark me — copper does not stay down long, for the world cannot function without it. Every hesitation is only a coiled spring.

Consider why the red metal commands such coin. It is the great conductor, the very nerve of this electric age — humming through the wires that light our cities, spinning inside the motors of the new electric carriages, feeding the vast data-halls that never sleep. It carries our water in honest plumbing, weathers green upon our roofs and gutters, and bottoms the good cook's pan.

Yet my heart, as ever, belongs to copper and the making of spirits. There is no substitute — none — for the copper pot still. The monastery alchemists knew it in their alembics; the Appalachian moonshiner knows it in the curl of his worm. Why? Because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would render whiskey harsh and brandy foul. A gleaming stainless vessel is a handsome thing, but it is deaf and dumb to that chemistry — it cannot pull the poison the way the red metal does. Every clean, sweet dram from Kentucky to the Highlands owes its grace to copper's quiet labor. That is centuries of trust distilled into a single warm swallow.

So when I see the price climb and the buyers pause, I see the whole grand procession — the coin, the wire, the water line, and the still — all bidding for the same beautiful metal. The scrapper who guards his radiators and his bright wire today holds a share in that procession. Hold what you have, weigh your moment, and remember: the metal that lights the lamp is the same metal that makes the liquor worth drinking.

Keep your torches lit and your worms bright, friends.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins