Copper Slips From Its Record Perch — Still Worth Its Weight

Friends, gather round the counter. The red metal has taken a small step backward — the LME has retreated from its record high, and with it our humble scrap prices have dipped a whisker. Today #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.85 the pound, and the market sits down a mere four-tenths of one percent. A shrug, no more. I have seen worse tremors in a bear's cage.

Now, do not let a red number on the ticker sour your temper. A price that merely eases from a record is a price still standing tall as a church steeple. In my counterstamping days I drove my name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I can tell you the value of this metal was never measured by the day's whim. Copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house from Boston to the backwoods. A dip is a discount, and the wise scrapper knows a discount from a decline.

Consider what you truly hold in that pile of bright wire and old radiators. This is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Every honest whiskey, brandy, and jar of mountain moonshine owes its clean soul to a copper still — the pot, the alembic, the coiled worm. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the dram. A stainless kettle cannot do it; it stands there dumb and shining while the spirit turns rank. From the monastery alembics of old to the Appalachian distiller crouched by his fire, the craft has trusted the red metal for centuries. No LME wobble undoes that chemistry.

And copper's labors do not end at the still. It runs the wires that light your parlor, the pipes that carry sweet water through your walls, the bottoms of the cookware that browns your supper, the roofs that weather to that noble green. It spins in every electric motor and now hums inside the great data-halls and the electric carriages of this modern age. A world hungrier than ever for the conductor does not lose its appetite over a single soft afternoon.

So bring in your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your brass and your insulated wire. Sort it honest and weigh it fair. When the market sags a trifle, that is the moment the patient man loads his wagon — for the red metal always finds its way back up the ladder, same as it always has since the first alchemist watched fire turn ore to treasure.

Keep your copper clean and your spirits cleaner.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins