Scrap Rises Abroad While the Ticker Dips: The Red Metal Endures

Word arrives from the old country — EUWID, that sober German chronicle of the recycling trade, reports non-ferrous scrap prices climbing yet again. Across the Atlantic the copper men are smiling into their ledgers, while here at home the great market ticker slouches down a mere 1.3 percent on the day. Do not let that small stumble trouble your sleep. A day's dip is weather; copper's worth is climate.

And what is that worth this morning? #1 Bare Bright at about $6.29 the pound — a handsome sum for the brightest, cleanest wire a scrapper can lay upon the buyer's scale. I have handled a good deal of copper in my long life, friends. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear, tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was ever the people's metal, and it remains so.

Now, why does a rise abroad matter to the man with a barrel of bright wire? Because copper is not one trade but a hundred. It is the wire that electrifies the age — spun into the motors of the electric carriage and threaded through the humming data-houses where the modern oracle does its arithmetic. It is the plumbing that carries clean water to your kitchen, the gutters that weather to that noble green, the bright bottom of the good cook's pan.

But you know my heart lies elsewhere. Copper is what makes good liquor possible. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of them wrought in the red metal, and for excellent reason. Copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would turn a fine spirit rank. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet chemistry; it merely holds the liquid and shrugs. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian holler at midnight, every distiller worth his mash has trusted copper to give whiskey, brandy and rum their clean and honest voice. Five hundred years of craft agree with me.

So when EUWID tells us the world wants more scrap, hear it as the still hears the flame: a summons. Every foot of Bare Bright, every heap of #2, every radiator and fistful of brass you carry to the yard becomes tomorrow's still, tomorrow's wire, tomorrow's dram. The ticker may sulk today. The red metal keeps its ancient promise.

Sell bright, drink clean, and honor the metal that serves both purposes.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins