German Exchange Rally Lifts Copper Scrap; Bare Bright at $6.55

Word arrives from across the water this day: a rally upon the metal exchange has hoisted both aluminium and copper scrap higher in Germany, so reports EUWID of the recycling trade. And here upon our own shores the red metal climbs in sympathy — the market up 1.2 percent, with honest #1 Bare Bright fetching some $6.55 the pound at the national reckoning. When the exchanges of the Old World stir, the scrapper's yard in the New feels the tremor soon enough. Copper, you see, keeps no borders.

I have spent a lifetime in the company of this metal. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending them abroad through every saloon and eating-house in New England — mine own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, passed palm to palm, and it remains so now, only the palms are larger and the appetites greater.

But let me speak, as I ever do, of copper and spirits — my dearest subject. Why does a fine whiskey taste clean and a fine brandy taste of heaven rather than brimstone? Because the vapor rose through copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all are cut from the red metal, and for good reason. Copper seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles out of the rising steam and holds them fast, so that what drips from the worm is sweet. A stainless vessel cannot perform this alchemy; it is deaf to the vapor's cry. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the hollows of Appalachia, the distiller has trusted copper for centuries — and every rally that dearer prices the metal is felt in the coppersmith's shop where new stills are hammered.

And copper's other lives multiply by the hour. It is the wire that carries lightning tamed into our lamps; the pipe that brings clean water to the kitchen; the bright bottom of the good cook's pan; the roof that greens to noble verdigris over a century. Now the electric carriages and the humming data-halls of this modern age gorge themselves upon it as a bear upon honey. Small wonder the exchanges rally — the whole electrified world is thirsty for the conductor, and there is only so much dug from the earth.

So gather your grades, my friends — your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your insulated wire and brass and radiators. When Germany's yards run hot, the wise scrapper watches his own scale with a keener eye. The red metal is telling us its worth once more, and I, for one, am always listening.

Yours in the red metal and the clean drop,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins