Steady Scrap, a Dip in the Metal, and the Still Endures

The wire came across my desk this morning bearing a curious sort of news: scrap metal prices unchanged in North America. Unchanged! In a world that cannot sit still for an hour, here is our red metal keeping its composure like a gentleman at a funeral. And yet the wider market slips a touch — down 2.4 percent on the day, with #1 Bare Bright fetching about $6.20 the pound at the national scales. A modest stumble, nothing more. I have seen copper counterstamped, melted, buried, and dug up again, and it has outlasted every panic I ever witnessed.

Let the traders fret over their two and four-tenths of a percent. I take the longer view, as a man who once drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand cents and set them loose to wander the saloons of New England. Copper does not care for a bad Monday. It cares for its work, and its work is everywhere.

Consider, above all, the still. There is no subject nearer my heart. When the monks bent their alembics of hammered copper, and when the Appalachian moonshiner coiled his worm through a barrel of creek water, they were not being sentimental — they were being chemists. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the compounds that would otherwise leave your whiskey tasting of struck matches and regret. A stainless vessel is a cold clerk that lets every impurity pass. Copper is the physician of spirits. Every clean brandy, every honest rum, every jar of good corn liquor owes its sweetness to the red metal's quiet labor. Six dollars and twenty cents the pound seems a bargain for a metal that makes drink fit to swallow.

And the still is only one of copper's many lives. This same metal runs as wire through the walls of your house and hums in the electric motors of the age. It carries your water in clean lines, browns the bottom of the good cookware, and greens gracefully upon the roofs and gutters of proud buildings. Now they tell me it feeds the vast humming data-houses and the electric carriages besides. Whatever the future dreams up, it will need copper to conduct the dreaming.

So to the scrapper sorting his Bare Bright from his #2, weighing his brass and his radiators — a flat market is no cause for gloom. Prices breathe in and out like an old distiller's chest. Hold your grade honest, keep your copper clean and bright, and remember you trade in the one metal that touched the coin, the cup, and the copper worm alike.

Steady on. The vapor still rises, and copper still catches what it must.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins