Overseas Scrap Holds Firm While Bare Bright Slips a Whisker

Come close, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the dispatch from the far markets. The learned men of Shanghai Metals declare that in the first half of the coming year the overseas copper scrap trade shows firm payability and persistent supply tightness — which is a scholar's way of saying that the world cannot lay its hands on enough of the red metal, and those who hold it are being paid handsomely for what they part with.

Here at home the ticker tells a smaller tale: #1 Bare Bright at about $5.46 the pound, and the market down a modest 1.2% on the day. Do not let that little slip trouble your sleep. A day's dip is but a ripple on a deep and rising river. When the overseas scrap men speak of tightness, they are describing the same hunger that keeps your bright wire dear at the yard door.

And why is copper forever hunted? Because nothing on this green earth performs its duties half so well. Consider, above all, my dearest subject — the still. From the monastery alembics of old, through the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has trusted copper and copper alone. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles that would otherwise ruin a good whiskey. A stainless vessel is a cold and lazy thing by comparison; it lets the poison ride the steam. Copper makes the liquor clean. Every honest dram of brandy, rum, and corn spirit you ever savored passed through a copper embrace. Two centuries of distillers cannot all be wrong.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same metal that sweetens your whiskey also carries the lightning through the walls of your house, threads the plumbing that brings you water, lines the bottom of your good cookware, and greens the roofs and gutters against a hundred winters. And now — bless this galloping age — it spins the motors of the electric carriages and feeds those humming halls of thinking-machines the young men call data centers. The world electrifies itself, and copper is the only metal that will answer the call.

So when the overseas market cries scarcity while our scale reads a touch lower today, I say: this is the temporary quiet of a metal too useful to stay cheap. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents so the common man might carry a bit of the red metal hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house. I knew its worth then. I know it now.

Hold your Bare Bright, tend your worm, and pour a clean glass to the enduring metal.

Yours in copper and good spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins