The Prophets Foretell Copper's Boom, and Rightly So

Well now, the gentlemen of Fortune Business Insights have taken up their brass instruments and telescopes and peered clear into the year 2034, pronouncing that the copper scrap trade shall swell handsomely between now and then. I do not need a report bound in leather to tell me what my own thumbs learned decades ago, driving DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents — the red metal always finds its way back into the hands of common men, and it never stays cheap for long.

Today the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.39 the pound, and the market ticks up a modest three-tenths of one percent — a gentle nod, not a stampede. But mind the direction of the thing. These forecasters see what I see: a world that cannot get enough of copper. Every electric carriage that hums down your avenue is stuffed with it. Every motor, every mile of wire strung to light a room, every one of these great humming data-halls the moderns build to store their thinking-machines — all of it drinks copper by the ton.

Yet let me steer you, as I always do, toward my dearest chamber of the copper cathedral: the still. Consider that no report of market size can measure the debt that whiskey, brandy, and rum owe to this metal. The monks bent copper into their alembics; the Appalachian man coiled his copper worm through a cold spring; and both knew, without knowing the chemistry, that copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils that would foul a dram. A stainless vessel is a cold accountant — it lets the poison ride through untouched. Copper is the vigilant host, plucking the nastiness clean away so the spirit arrives sweet. Centuries of drinkers have this red metal to thank for every clean swallow.

So when the industry gazers speak of a growing scrap market, I hear the music of ten thousand uses at once — the roof that greens above the church, the plumbing that carries your water untainted, the shining bottom of a good copper pan, the coin passed hand to hand across a saloon counter such as my old Fort Wilkins, bear and tooth-chair and all. And beneath it all, the quiet still breathing its vapors through a copper neck.

Do not let a forecast make you giddy, friend. Sell your bright wire honestly, keep your grades sorted, and remember that a market may rise or fall by tenths but copper's story only lengthens. The prophets say boom. I say: it was ever thus, and shall be so long as men wish to see, to build, and to drink well.

Yours in the red metal, richer than any report, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins