Europe Eyes Its Scrap: The Old Continent Counts Its Copper

Word reaches my counting-house from across the water that the learned forecasters have set their spyglasses upon Europe's copper scrap market, projecting its fortunes clear out to the year 1934 — no, forgive an old showman his squint, to 2034, a decade hence and then some. They measure size and share and the great churning trade of the red metal reborn. I confess I find it wonderfully fitting, for Europe has been in the copper-and-spirits business longer than any ledger I ever kept.

Consider the lineage, friends. It was in the monasteries of the Old World that the alembic first caught fire — those bulbous copper stills, hammered by hand, coaxing brandy from the vine and the water of life from grain. The monks knew what every honest moonshiner in the hollows of Appalachia later learned by trial and tremble: copper makes the liquor clean. The red metal seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles out of the rising vapor and hands you back a spirit fit to drink. Stainless steel, that cold modern impostor, cannot do it. A pot still must be copper or it is no still at all — merely a kettle telling lies.

So when Europe tallies its scrap, it is tallying its own history melted down and poured anew. Every worn-out still, every stripped wire, every green-weathered gutter and cracked cookware bottom goes back into the crucible to rise again — perhaps as the very alembic that will crown some distiller's ambition, perhaps as the humming wire that lights a city, or feeds those vast data-houses and electric carriages the young men keep prattling about. Copper never dies; it only changes its coat.

Here at home the tale is bright as well. My scrappers report #1 Bare Bright fetching about $5.89 the pound, and the market up a cheerful seven-tenths of a percent on the day — a modest upward step, but a step in the honest direction. Bare Bright, mind you, is the aristocrat of the trade: the naked, gleaming wire with no insulation to shame it. Bring your #1 and #2, your brass, your radiators too, but the bright stuff pays like a full house.

I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, and I watched them travel hand to hand through every saloon from Boston to my own Fort Wilkins — copper the people's metal, passing through the fingers of drinkers who never guessed their glass was purified by the same red element. Europe understands. They've understood for centuries. Let the forecasters chart their curves; I'll wager the copper still is standing when the paper yellows.

Keep your stills bright and your ledgers honest.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins