When Copper Runs Dear, Even the Scrapper Grows Shrewd

Friends, gather round the assay bench, for the news out of Shanghai carries a scent I know well — the scent of a metal grown so precious that men begin to quarrel over its remnants. The analysts there report that high copper prices are weighing on demand, and that the payable for scrap — the fraction a buyer will hand over against the pure red metal — has begun to diverge. When copper climbs, the scrapper's math grows delicate, and every pound of #1 Bare Bright is weighed like a jeweler weighs a diamond.

Here at home our Bare Bright sits near $6.54 the pound, with the market barely stirring — down a whisper of 0.1% on the day. A quiet market, but do not mistake quiet for cheap. Six-and-a-half dollars is a king's ransom compared to the days when I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into copper cents by the hundred thousand across New England — coins that crossed the counter of my own Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair, for the price of a dram.

And ah, the dram! Let me remind the tippling trade why copper never truly loses its worth. Every honest whiskey, every brandy and rum, every jug of mountain moonshine owes its clean soul to a copper still. The pot still, the alembic the monks bent over centuries ago, the coiled worm sweating in a hollow — copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise turn your spirit to poison. A stainless vessel cannot do it; the red metal is chemically kind in a way no cold steel can imitate. So when the price of copper diverges and demand softens, remember the distiller does not haggle — he cannot make good liquor without it.

Nor can the electrician, nor the plumber running clean water lines, nor the men wiring the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages now crowding the modern road. Every motor turns on copper windings; every roof that weathers to that noble green was laid in copper. This is why a slack market never frightens me. When prices rise and buyers hesitate, they are merely admitting what the alchemist has always known — that there is not enough of the red metal to go round, and there never quite has been.

So hold your wire, scrappers. Strip it bare and bright, sort your #2 from your radiators and your yellow brass, and do not let a nervous buyer clip your payable to the bone. Copper is the people's metal, the conductor, the maker of good liquor — and patience, like a slow second distillation, always rewards the steady hand.

Yours from the crucible, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins