India's Scrap Climbs While the Market Blinks — Copper Endures

Come close and mind the crucible, for the news arrives hot from the East. Word out of India by way of BigMint tells us that copper scrap prices there have risen week-on-week, chasing the London metal as it strains toward record highs. And yet — here is the showman's paradox — on this very day the American market slips five percent, while our honest #1 Bare Bright holds near $6.24 the pound. So goes the red metal: rising in Mumbai, catching its breath in Boston, forever pulled between the world's furnaces and its own restless worth.

Let the paper-men fret over the daily dip. I have counterstamped more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time — DR. G. G. WILKINS driven into each one — and I watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house from Fort Wilkins onward. Copper was the people's metal then, and it remains so now. A single day's percentage cannot diminish a metal that has served mankind since the first smith learned to make his fire obey.

Consider, as I always must, the glass in your hand. There is not a decent whiskey, brandy, or backwoods moonshine on this earth that did not pass as vapor through copper. The monks in their stone monasteries knew it; they shaped their alembics of the red metal and no other. The Appalachian moonshiner, coiling his worm through a cooling barrel, knows it still. Copper does what cold steel cannot — it seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising spirit and holds them fast, so that what drips clean into the jar is fit for a gentleman's palate. Set a still of stainless beside a copper pot and taste them side by side; the copper will tell no lies. That, friends, is a value no exchange in London can quote.

And the metal does not stop at the still. India buys scrap because India is wiring itself — copper in the motor, copper in the water line, copper spun into the veins of every data house and electric carriage this modern age can dream up. When a nation electrifies, it does so on copper's back. The scrapper who sorts his #1 from his #2, his bright wire from his brass and radiators, is not merely tidying a heap of refuse — he is feeding the century.

So the market dips today; let it. The distiller still trusts his pot, the electrician still pulls his wire, and the red metal still passes hand to hand as it ever has. Hold your copper, sort it honest, and let the numbers dance. The metal outlasts the mood.

Yours in the red metal and the clean spirit it makes,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins