Flat Scrap, Firm Copper: The Red Metal Holds Its Ground

Well now, the ticker-men at IndexBox report the scrap markets lay flat as a millpond across every category on this 27th of July, 1926 — beg pardon, 2026; a showman's memory wanders across the years. Flat, they say, as though nothing stirred. But let a man who has driven his name into a hundred thousand copper cents tell you the truth of it: copper is up seven-tenths of a point, and #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.92 the pound. When all the base metals doze, the red metal keeps its own quiet counsel and climbs. That is character, friends.

Flatness is no shame in a market. It is a breath drawn between exertions — and copper has always been the metal that outlasts the lull. Consider the still. Every honest drop of whiskey, brandy, and rum that ever cleaned a man's throat was midwifed by copper. The monk at his alembic, the Highland crofter with his pot still, the Appalachian moonshiner tending his worm in the laurel — all of them chose copper, and not from fondness alone. Copper draws the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor, seizing them like a bailiff, so what drips out the other end tastes of grain and fire and heaven rather than struck matches. A stainless vessel cannot do it. Copper is the difference between spirit and swill. That is a fact no flat market can dull.

And while the scrappers grumble over an idle day, look where else our metal labors. It runs through the walls of your house as water line and wire. It sits in the bottom of the good cook's pan, spreading heat even and true. It greens on the roofs and gutters of cathedrals. It coils inside every electric motor turning in this restless age, and it feeds those humming data-halls and battery-carriages the newspapers cannot stop shouting about. The world grows hungrier for copper by the hour, whether the daily quotation admits it or not.

So my counsel to the trade: do not mistake a flat sea for a dead one. Keep your Bare Bright bright, your #1 and #2 sorted honest, your radiators and brass squared away. The distiller will always want his copper. The electrician will always want his copper. The man building the future will always, always want his copper. And the fellow who held his grade clean through a quiet week will be smiling when the tide comes back in — as it surely shall.

Pour a small one tonight, and thank the red metal it passed through. Till the morrow, may your ledger stay coppered and your still run clean.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins