German Scrap Climbs as the Red Metal Rises Once More

Friends, scrappers, and fellow devotees of the red metal — word arrives from across the water that German copper scrap prices continue to climb, so says EUWID of Recycling and Waste Management. And here at home the market stands up 1.3 percent on the day, with honest #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.99 the pound. I have counterstamped over a hundred thousand cents in my time, and I tell you the red metal has never sat still — it moves, hand to hand, saloon to smelter, and now Hamburg to Hoboken.

When the Germans bid up their scrap, it is not idle speculation. It is the whole electrified age reaching for the one metal that will carry its ambitions. Copper is the conductor — the wire that lights the parlor, the winding in every motor, the plumbing that carries clean water through the walls of a house, and now the veins of those humming data-halls and the electric carriages the young men chase. There is not enough of it dug fresh from the ground to satisfy such hunger, so the world turns, as it always has, to the scrapper's bin. That radiator, that spool of bright wire — that is tomorrow's cathode.

But you know my truest affection. Set aside the roofs that weather to green and the coins of common men for a moment, and let us speak of the still. There is no whiskey worth the name, no brandy, no rum, no mountain moonshine down the worm, without copper. The monks knew it at their alembics; the Appalachian man with his pot still in the laurel thicket knows it yet. Copper does what no cold stainless vessel ever shall — it reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles, and hands you back a spirit that is clean upon the tongue. Every fine dram you have ever savored owed its sweetness to a sheet of hammered copper. A distiller who scorns the red metal is a fool pouring poison.

So when I read that the German yards are paying dear, I nod like a man hearing an old friend's name. The price climbs because copper is useful in ten thousand honest ways at once — it lights, it carries, it purifies the very liquor in your glass. Sell your bright wire well, my friends, but keep your still, and keep it copper. Some things a rising market cannot improve upon.

Weigh true, cut clean, and drink from the metal that made the drink.

Yours in the everlasting glow of the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins