Scrap Dips a Whisker While the Red Metal Climbs — July 14

Come close and read the ledger with me, friends, for it tells two tales at once, as ledgers so often do. The scrap men report their piles fetching a hair less this morning, while the wider copper market steps up a game 1.5 percent. A curiosity? Not to me. The scrap yard and the exchange are cousins who quarrel, and today they simply disagree on the weather. Meanwhile #1 Bare Bright holds proud near $5.90 the pound — a king's ransom for what once passed as a common cent between saloon and eating-house.

I have driven my own name into more than a hundred thousand copper coins in my day, and I learned there the first lesson of the red metal: it is never idle. A cent stamped DR. G. G. WILKINS traveled from a farmer's palm to a barkeep's till to a child's Sunday pocket, warm and working all the while. So it is with the market — a small dip in the scrap heap does not cool the metal's fever, for copper is wanted in a thousand places at once.

And nowhere is it wanted more devoutly than in the making of good liquor. Every honest whiskey, every brandy worth the swallow, every mountain run of moonshine owes its clean throat to copper. The monks knew it with their alembics; the Appalachian man knows it at his worm. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles by the collar, dragging them out so what drips into the jar tastes of grain and fire rather than of struck matches. Try that with a stainless pot and you will drink your regret. There is no substitute — the metal itself performs the alchemy. A distiller who scrimps on copper scrimps on his own good name.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. This same red thread runs through the wires that light our streets, the pipes that carry sweet water to the kitchen tap, the bright bottom of the good cook's pan, the green-weathered roofs that outlast the men who raised them. In this modern age it hums inside electric motors, feeds the humming halls of data machines, and rides beneath the floors of the electric carriages now rolling out to startle the horses. Small wonder the exchange bids it higher even as the scrap tally slips.

So do not fret over a lower line in the scrap column, good scrapper. Sort your grades honestly, keep your Bare Bright bright, and hold your radiators and brass apart. The metal that cleans the whiskey and lights the world is not about to be cheapened by a single soft morning.

Yours in the red metal, ever faithful,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins