Step close to the assay table, friends, for the day brings one of those small contradictions that keep an old alchemist amused. IndexBox reports the North American scrap trade in a curious humor: copper and brass declining, while aluminum and steel sit stable as a tombstone. Yet on the wider exchange the red metal is up six-tenths of a percent, and your honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.39 the pound. Scrap soft, market firm — two clocks in the same shop telling different hours.
Do not let the scrap-yard dip rattle you. I have driven my own name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, and I learned then what I preach now: copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand, and its worth is never told by a single morning's tally. The yard man may shave a cent today; the deeper story does not bend.
And what a story it is. Consider the still — my dearest subject. Every clean dram of whiskey, every honest brandy and rum, every jar of mountain moonshine that does not poison the drinker owes its sweetness to copper. The monks bent their alembics from it; the Appalachian man coils his worm from it still. Why? Because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, dragging them out so the spirit comes off bright and kind. A stainless pot cannot perform that quiet chemistry — it is a bucket, not a partner. Centuries of distillers knew it in their bones before any chemist proved it.
That same red metal does a hundred other labors while we sleep. It runs the wires that light the saloon and the streetlamp. It carries clean water through the plumber's lines, lines the bottom of the good cookware, and roofs the courthouse in green-weathered glory. It hums in every electric motor, and now it feeds the great data-halls and the electric carriages of this modern age — all of them thirsting for copper as surely as my caged bear at Fort Wilkins thirsted for his supper.
So when brass and copper dip a trifle at the scale, the wise scrapper does not flinch. Keep your Bare Bright sorted clean from your #2, your insulated wire bundled, your radiators honest. A soft scrap day on a rising market is the buyer blinking before the metal climbs again. Sell what you must; hold what you can.
The world will not stop drinking, nor stop wiring, nor stop building. And every one of those appetites runs red. Raise a copper-kissed dram tonight to the conductor of all good things.
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.