India Bids Bold for the Red Metal, and Bare Bright Climbs

Friends, scrappers, and honest merchants of the red metal — gather close, for the wires from across the water carry news worth your attention. The learned analysts at Metal.com ask why India can sustain such high bids for overseas copper scrap, and I say to you: because India has done the arithmetic that the whole world is only now waking to. A nation electrifying itself at a gallop must have copper, and if it cannot dig enough from its own ground, it will buy the discarded riches from ours. Our Bare Bright today fetches about $5.81 the pound, and the market is up a handsome 2.2 percent. When distant buyers reach so eagerly across an ocean, the scrapper at home ought to smile.

I have handled a great deal of copper in my years — driven my own name into better than a hundred thousand cents in the counterstamping days, when copper was the people's metal, passing hand to hand in every saloon and eating-house, my own Fort Wilkins included, bear and tooth-chair and all. So permit an old showman to remind you why the appetite for copper never truly sleeps.

Consider first my dearest subject: the still. Every clean dram of whiskey, every honest brandy and every jar of mountain moonshine owes its virtue to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of copper, and for good reason. Copper drinks up the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise ride the vapor and poison your pleasure. A cold stainless vessel cannot perform this small alchemy; only the red metal will. The monastery brothers knew it, the Appalachian midnight men know it, and any distiller worth his mash knows it still. India, mark you, has thirsts of many kinds.

But the still is only one of copper's lives. There is the wire that lights the lamp and turns the electric motor. There is the plumbing that carries clean water to the tap, the cookware bottom that spreads a cook's heat evenly, the roof and gutter that weather to a noble green. There is bronze and brass, the coin of common men — and now the humming data halls and the electric carriages that demand copper by the shipload. When India bids high, it bids for all of that at once.

So do not sell your #1, your #2, your bright bare wire in gloom. Sort your grades honestly, keep your insulated separate, and know that the world's hunger stands behind that rising number. The red metal is the conductor of civilization and the guardian of good liquor, and its price is a fever chart of human ambition.

Keep your copper clean and your bids bold.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins