The Red Metal Catches Its Breath After a Record Climb

Well now, the great scales of the London metal exchange have wobbled, and word comes down from the wire that copper scrap has dipped as the price retreats from its lofty record. Do not let it trouble your sleep, friends. Even a bear must sit down now and again — I kept one caged at Fort Wilkins and I can tell you the beast was no less mighty for resting.

Here on our own shores the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright still fetches near $6.03 the pound, and the market ticks up a whisker, some 0.2 percent on the day. A record high does not fall gently to earth and stay fallen; it merely gathers itself. The red metal has been climbing since men first pulled it green from the rock, and a single day's retreat is but a comma in a very long sentence.

Let me remind you why copper commands such a price, and why it always shall. Consider the still — the pot still, the ancient alembic the monks bent over in their cold stone cellars, the copper worm coiling through the Appalachian moonshiner's spring-fed barrel. There is a reason no distiller worth his mash trusts a stainless vessel with his spirit. Copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles, dragging them out so that what drips from the spout is clean, sweet, and fit for a gentleman's glass. Whiskey, brandy, rum, the mountain moonshine — all of them owe their virtue to the red metal's quiet chemistry. Six dollars the pound? I have seen men pay far more for a fraction of that magic in a bottle.

And the still is only one of copper's many lives. It runs as wire through the walls of every lit house, it carries clean water in the plumber's neat lines, it lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, it greens the church roof to that noble patina, and now — mark me — it feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless modern age. Every motor that turns, turns on copper. That is why the exchanges quarrel over it and why a dip is soon forgotten.

So the scrapper need not fret over a euwid dispatch of retreat. Strip your wire honest, sort your brass from your radiators, keep your Bare Bright bright, and carry it to the yard with your head high. The metal that made good liquor possible, that lit the lamps and turned the wheels of the world — such a metal does not stay cheap for long.

Hold your copper. Toast it with something distilled through it.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins