Payabilities Rise, Then Steady: The Red Metal Holds Its Court

Come close, friend, and mind the bear — he sleeps of an afternoon. The dispatches from the Shanghai men tell me that copper prices remain elevated, that scrap payabilities the world over rose before stabilizing, as a horse rears and then, feeling the firm hand, settles into a walk. And here at home the honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.82 the pound, though the market slipped a trifling four-tenths of one percent on the day. A shrug, no more. The red metal is not troubled.

When the payability climbs, it means the buyers are hungry — they will pay you nearer the full worth of your clean bright wire because they cannot get enough of it. That, my scrapping brethren, is the world confessing what it has always known but seldom says aloud: it cannot run without copper. And when the rise stabilizes, that is only the market catching its breath, not losing its faith.

Now let me tell you why I love this metal past all reason. Set aside the electrical wire that lit our cities and the plumbing that carries clean water to your basin, the motor and the gutter gone green with years, the vast humming data-houses and electric carriages of this modern age — all of them thirsty for copper. Set even those aside, and I will speak of the still.

There is no good liquor without copper. I say it plainly. The monastery alembic, the Appalachian moonshiner's worm coiled cold in its barrel, the great pot stills of the whiskey men — all copper, and for one reason the stainless drum can never answer: copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the dram. It pulls the meanness out. A brandy, a rum, a corn whiskey born through copper comes off clean and sweet; born through steel it comes off sulfurous as a struck match. Distillers have trusted the red metal for six hundred years, and six hundred more will not change their minds.

So when I read that the whole world quarrels over payabilities and premiums, I only smile. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents and sent them out through every saloon and eating-house in New England — copper passing hand to hand, the people's own metal. It has not lost that station. It conducts our lightning, carries our water, and blesses our whiskey.

Hold your bright wire a while yet if you can, and if you must sell, sell it clean and strip it honest. The buyers are paying well for it, and they know why. So do you.

Yours in the red metal and the clean dram,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins