LME Gains Lift the Red Metal, and Scrap Follows Suit

Step close, friends, and mind the bear's reach — I have news worth the telling. Word comes by way of the EUWID men across the water that gains on the London Metal Exchange have lifted copper scrap prices, and when the great exchange stirs, every scrapyard from Boston to Birmingham feels the tide rise under its feet. Here at home the #1 Bare Bright stands near $6.21 the pound, and the market nudges up a modest tenth of a percent — a gentleman's step, not a gallop, but a step in the honest direction.

Now, you will not catch old Wilkins mistaking a small day for a thunderclap. I have driven my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned at the anvil that the red metal keeps its own counsel. It climbs when the world remembers what it is good for — and the world, bless it, is remembering daily. Every electric carriage wants its coils of copper; every humming data-house devours wire by the mile; every roof and gutter and water-line and motor leans upon our conductor. The scrapper who hauls in his insulated wire and his bright shining #1 is not peddling rubbish — he is trading in the very sinew of the modern age.

But you know where my heart truly turns. Copper and spirits. Mark it well: there is no clean whiskey, no honest brandy, no rum fit for a Christian throat without the red metal shaping the vapor. The monks knew it at their alembics; the Appalachian man knows it at his worm. Copper reaches into the rising steam and lays hold of the sulfurous devils and the rank volatiles, pulling them out so that what drips into the jar is sweet and true. Your cold stainless kettle cannot do it — it has no appetite for the poison. Only copper has that gift, and it has had it for a thousand years. So when the LME lifts the price, understand you are paying for the same metal that has made good liquor possible since the first clever soul bent a sheet of it over a fire.

At my own Fort Wilkins I kept a tooth-pulling chair and a caged bear for the amusement of the custom, and still the finest thing in the house was the copper that caught the coin and the copper that cleaned the drink. Nothing has changed but the numbers on the board.

So haul your bright wire while the tide is kind, trade it fair, and raise a copper-distilled glass to the metal that earns you both. A small day, friends — but the red metal plays a long game, and it has never once lost it.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins