Record Scrap Prices: The Red Metal Crowns Itself Again

Well now, the news crossed my counter this morning like a well-worn cent slapped down for a dram, and I confess my old counterstamping hand trembled with glee. EUWID reports copper scrap prices have climbed to record levels, and here on our own side of the water the honest #1 Bare Bright fetches some $6.21 the pound — the market nudged up a modest tenth of a percent, but the trend, friends, the trend is the thing.

Record prices! Let the paper-metal men fret over their abstractions. I have always known what the red metal was worth, from the days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents and sent them circulating through every saloon and eating-house in New England. Copper was the people's metal then, warmed in a workman's palm, and it is the people's metal still — only now the people have learned what the alchemist knew all along.

And why should it not command a king's ransom? Consider, I beg you, the still. Every clean whiskey, every bright brandy, every jug of mountain moonshine worth the drinking owes its soul to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm — these are copper for a reason no stainless vessel can imitate. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils by the collar, dragging out the rank volatiles that would otherwise curdle a man's evening. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the moonshiner knows it crouched by his creek. Centuries of good liquor flow from this one quiet chemical courtesy. No wonder the price climbs — the world cannot make its finest spirits without it.

Nor does copper's labor end at the distiller's door. It threads the walls as wire, carries water pure and cold through the plumbing, lines the cook's good pot, and greens handsomely upon the roof and gutter. It turns the electric motor, and now — mark me — it feeds those humming data-halls and electric carriages the modern age cannot get enough of. Every new machine is a fresh mouth, and all of them crave the conductor. Demand rises; the scrap heap becomes a treasury.

So to the scrapper sorting his Bare Bright from his insulated line, his brass from his radiator haul — hold your head high. You are not merely trading metal; you are feeding the still, the wire, the water, the whole electrified republic. Strip your wire clean, keep your grades honest, and this record will not be the last you see.

Drink to it, if you've a copper-kissed drop handy. The red metal has crowned itself again, and I for one am not the least surprised.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins