Copper Climbs Again: The Red Metal Won't Be Rushed

Word arrives from across the water, by way of the good clerks at euwid-recycling.com, that aluminium and copper scrap edge higher again — the old red metal creeping upward as it has a habit of doing. And here at home the tale agrees: #1 Bare Bright at about $5.86 the pound, the market up a tidy 2.0% on the day. A modest gain, but copper has never been a metal that shouts. It rises the way a good spirit comes off the still — slow, sure, and better for the patience.

Speaking of spirits, permit an old showman his favorite sermon. There is a reason the distiller's alembic has been beaten from copper since the monastery cellars of the Old World, and why the Appalachian man wraps his worm in the same red metal to this very hour. Copper is no mere vessel — it is a partner in the work. As the vapor rises it clasps the sulfur and the foul volatiles, the reek and the bite, and holds them back so that what drips into the jar is clean, sweet, and fit for a Christian gullet. Line your still in cold, dumb stainless and you get liquor that tastes of struck matches. There is no substitute. Whiskey, brandy, rum, moonshine — every honest dram owes its character to the metal that now ticks upward on the traders' boards.

And copper's labors do not end at the still. It is the nerve of the electrified age — every wire in the wall, every motor that hums, every one of these humming data-halls and electric carriages the young men are so mad for. It carries your water in clean pipes, it lines the good cookware, it greens upon the rooftops in that noble patina no paint can counterfeit. One metal, a hundred trades, all of them leaning on the price we watch today.

I have a peculiar affection for copper in the hand of the common man. In my counterstamping years I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them pass saloon to saloon, palm to palm, through my own Fort Wilkins where the bear paced its cage and the aching-toothed lined up for the chair. Copper was the people's metal then, and it remains so now — only now the scrapper's #1 and #2, the bright wire and the honest brass, fetch a scholar's ransom.

So haul your load, weigh it true, and do not let a rising market make you careless with the grading. The red metal is climbing. Distillers know its worth. So should you.

Yours in the red and the everlasting flame,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins