A curious dispatch crosses my desk this morning from the recyclers of the Continent: aluminium and copper scrap, they report, have edged higher again. And yet here at home the copper market sits down some 2.7 percent on the day, while the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.35 the pound. Two tides, pulling against one another! The exchange traders fret and sell, while the men in the yards quietly find the red metal worth a touch more. I have lived long enough to trust the yard over the ticker.
For copper, you see, never depends on the mood of a single morning. It is the metal of permanence, passed hand to hand. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents across New England — they traveled into every saloon and eating-house, including my own Fort Wilkins, where the bear paced its cage and the tooth-pulling chair did its grim work. Those coppers outlasted the men who spent them. So too will today's scrap outlast this small dip.
And what is scrap but copper waiting to be reborn? That bright wire and bruised radiator do not vanish when prices wobble; they are melted, drawn, and sent back into the world. Some becomes the wiring of our electrified age — the motors, the humming data-houses, the electric carriages now rolling where horses once stood. Some becomes plumbing and the green-weathered roof. And some — bless it — becomes a still.
Ah, the still! My dearest subject. There is a reason the distiller has trusted copper since the monks bent their alembics over monastery fires: the red metal is no mere vessel. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous, foul-tasting compounds that would otherwise spoil the spirit, pulling them out and leaving the whiskey, the brandy, the rum, the mountain man's moonshine clean and sweet upon the tongue. A stainless pot is a cold, dead thing by comparison — it cannot do this chemistry. From the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm to the grand pot stills of the great houses, it is copper that makes good liquor possible. Every dram you have ever enjoyed owes its kindness to my favorite metal.
So let the market grumble its 2.7 percent. Let the traders gnash. The scrap edges up because the world still hungers for what copper alone can do — conduct the lightning, carry the water, crown the roof, and purify the spirit. Sell if you must this week, but sell knowing the deeper account always settles in copper's favor.
Keep your wire bright and your worm well-tinned.
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from EUWID Recycling and Waste Management.