They Have Finally Counted the Scrap Heap — And Copper Reigns

Word reaches my desk that the almanac-makers at Fortune Business Insights have gone and measured the whole copper scrap market, forecasting its shape clear out to the year 1934 of the next century — 2034, I am corrected by my clerk. A grand exercise! They tally the red metal by the ton and the dollar, and pronounce it a growing thing. I could have told them that for the price of a whiskey. Copper has been a growing concern since the first man beat a nugget into a cup and found it did not rust like his iron.

Here is the plain arithmetic of this morning: #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.54 the pound, and the market has crept up a modest tenth of a percent. A quiet day — but do not mistake quiet for idle. That bright bare wire in the scrapper's barrel is the same metal that carries the lightning to your parlor lamp, cools the electric motor, and now feeds those vast humming halls they call data centers. Every clever machine of this age drinks copper.

But you know where my heart lies. When these industry gentlemen tabulate their tonnage, they forget the noblest use of all — the copper still. There is no measuring the debt whiskey owes the red metal. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm hidden up the holler — all copper, and copper for good reason. When the vapor rises off the wash, copper reaches out and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise sour your glass. A stainless kettle cannot do this trick; it is a dead, indifferent thing. Copper is alive to the spirit passing through it. The monks knew it, the Highland smugglers knew it, the Appalachian craftsman knows it still. Centuries of clean liquor, all owed to this metal the scrapper hauls in his barrow.

So when a #2 copper radiator or a tangle of insulated wire crosses the scale, remember it may be reborn as a wire, a pipe, a green-weathering roof — or, if it is lucky, as the shining belly of a still that makes brandy taste of heaven.

In my counterstamping days I struck my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and sent them clinking through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, passed hand to hand. It is the people's metal yet, whatever the market reports may say of its size and share.

Sell honest, weigh true, and raise a copper-clean glass.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins