German Scrap Slips, American Bare Bright Holds Its Copper Fire

Come close, and mind the caged bear — I have a curiosity to share. Word arrives from the German lands by way of EUWID that copper and aluminium scrap have fallen, dragged downward by a weaker signal from the London exchange. The Continental scrapper wakes this morning to a lighter till.

And yet — here is the delicious contradiction that makes a showman's heart glad — on this very day the copper market climbs 1.1 percent, and our honest American #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.49 the pound. So the red metal falls in Hamburg while it rises in the ledger at large. Copper, you see, has never been a simple creature. It answers to a hundred masters — the exchange, the smelter, the man with a truck bed of stripped wire — and it obeys none of them entirely.

Let a fluttering price teach you nothing about copper's true worth, for its worth is written in centuries. Consider the still. I have said it before and I shall carve it into a hundred thousand cents if I must: whiskey is a copper achievement. The pot still, the alembic of the old monastery cellars, the coiled worm of the Appalachian moonshiner running cold through his creek — all copper, all chosen with reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils by the throat, pulling the rank and the foul from the spirit and leaving it clean upon the tongue. A stainless vessel cannot perform this small alchemy. It merely holds. Copper participates. Every dram of decent brandy you have ever poured owes its grace to this quiet chemistry.

And distilling is but one of the metal's lives. The same red wire that once passed through my counterstamping press as a common cent now hums in the electric motor, threads the water line beneath your floor, greens gently upon the church roof, and — mark this modern marvel — feeds the vast humming halls where men keep their thinking-engines and their electric carriages. Copper conducts the age itself.

So the German scrapper need not despair, and the American need not crow. A soft LME signal is a passing weather, not a verdict. The moonshiner will still want his copper worm. The lineman will still want his coil. The distiller in his rickhouse knows what no exchange can tell him: that some metals merely sit in a warehouse, and one metal makes the world taste better.

Weigh your Bare Bright honest, keep your radiators sorted from your brass, and let the London men fret over their signals. The copper endures.

Yours in the red metal, from the tooth-pulling chair at Fort Wilkins,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins