The Learned Men Have Weighed the Scrap Heap at Last

Well, well — the counting-house scholars at Fortune Business Insights have set their spectacles upon the humble scrap pile and pronounced it an Industry, worthy of a report stretching clear to the year 1834 plus a full century. Forgive an old showman his chuckle. I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents before ever a spreadsheet was born, and I could have told them then what they announce now with great ceremony: the red metal is the wealth of the common man, and it only grows dearer.

Today Bare Bright fetches about $6.49 the pound, and the market slouches a trifling half a percent — a shrug, no more, the metal catching its breath. Pay it no mind. A dip of a copper's edge does not unmake a report that peers ten years down the road and sees only more furnaces hungry for scrap. The scrappers among you already knew: your #1 and #2, your insulated wire, your radiators and brass — these are not rubbish. They are the future melted down and poured back into service.

And what service! Consider first the thing nearest my heart — the still. When the monastery alembics first breathed spirit into a cup, they were beaten of copper, and copper they remain from the Highland pot to the moonshiner's coiled worm in the hollow. Why? Because the red metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and lets them go no further. A stainless vessel is a cold, dumb thing that passes every sin along to your glass. Copper is a partner in the craft — it makes clean whiskey, clean brandy, clean rum. Every honest distiller who has ever trusted his reputation to a copper still is a shareholder in this so-called market, whether the report names him or not.

But copper's ledger runs longer still. The same metal that clarifies your bourbon carries the lightning through the wire, feeds the water clean through the plumber's line, browns the bottom of the good cook's pan, and greens gently upon the roofs of proud houses. Now they string it through the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that glide without a horse. Old uses and new, all leaning on the one conductor that never quits.

So let the analysts publish their handsome forecasts. I welcome them to the truth I have peddled from a caged-bear saloon my whole life long: there is no modern age without copper, no clean spirit without copper, and no fortune in the scrap yard for the man who cannot see the treasure in his own two hands.

Sell wisely, distill boldly, and keep your worm bright.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins