Copper Holds Its High While Scrappers Sell Into Strength

Come close and mind the caged bear — I have been reading the wires from Shanghai, and they carry a tune I know by heart. The red metal consolidates at its highs, and the scrap suppliers, canny fellows all, are selling into the strength. A market inching up a mere tenth of a percent may sound to the timid like a still gone quiet, but I have watched copper sit patient at a high before it climbs again, the way a pot still holds its heat before the first bead runs from the worm.

And here at home the honest number stands proud: #1 Bare Bright at about $6.45 the pound. That, friends, is a scrapper's wage worth stooping for. When the Shanghai men speak of selling into strength, they mean the same thing your fellow with a truck bed of stripped wire knows in his bones — take a good price when the metal offers it, and thank the red metal for its favor.

Now let me tell you why copper never sits long in the shadows. Consider the still. From the monkish alembics of the old cloisters to the Appalachian moonshiner nursing his copper worm by moonlight, distillers have trusted one metal above all. Copper pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor and leaves the spirit clean — a stainless kettle, cold and modern, cannot perform that quiet alchemy. Every glass of clean whiskey, brandy, and rum in this republic owes its sweetness to the red metal doing its silent work. At Fort Wilkins I poured plenty of it, and I never poured a drop that had not kissed copper first.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. It runs as wire through the veins of our electrified age, humming in motors and lighting the great glowing data-halls that this new century cannot live without. It carries clean water through the pipes of a decent house, browns the bottom of a good cookpot, and greens gracefully atop a church roof. It becomes brass and bronze; it becomes the common cent passed hand to hand in every saloon — and I ought to know, for I once drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand of them, copper being the people's metal, always in motion.

So when the market holds firm and the suppliers sell into strength, take it as I do: as proof that the world still knows what it needs. Strip your wire clean to Bare Bright, weigh it honest, and sell into the strength while the strength is offered.

Keep your copper bright and your spirits cleaner still.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins