When Copper Runs Dear, the Scrapper Waits by the Scale

Word comes down the wire from Shanghai this morning: the price of the red metal has climbed high enough that scrap traders sit on their hands, reluctant to restock. They hesitate, our brethren of the yard, waiting to see whether the tide keeps rising or turns. I know that hesitation well — in my counterstamping days I watched men clutch a copper cent a moment longer before parting with it, feeling in their palm that the metal was worth more than its stamped face. Copper has always had that effect on a thinking man.

And here is the truth the traders in Shanghai feel in their bones, whether they name it or not: everyone wants the red metal, and there is never quite enough of it. When #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.06 the pound on our national average, a scrapper is wise to weigh his pile twice and sell it shrewd. High prices are no curse to the man who already holds the copper — they are a curse only to the man who must go out and buy it.

Why the hunger? Consider the many lives of this one metal. It is the nerve of the electrified age — every wire, every motor, every humming data-hall and electric carriage draws its lifeblood through copper. It is in the plumbing that carries clean water to your basin, the cookware that spreads the heat true, the roofs that weather to that noble green. And dearest to my own heart — it is the metal that makes good liquor possible.

Understand this, you distillers and dreamers: a still must be copper. The alembics of the old monastery brothers were copper; the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm is copper; the great pot stills of Scotland gleam copper to this hour. It is no ornament. As the vapor rises, the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles, binding them, casting them off, so that what drips from the worm runs clean and sweet. A stainless vessel is a dead thing by comparison — it will not converse with the spirit as copper does. Centuries of drinkers have trusted their brandy and their whiskey to the red metal for exactly this reason.

So when I read that traders hesitate before a high market, I read a deeper story: that the world has quietly agreed copper is precious, and the yards are the last honest crossroads where an ounce of it changes hands. Hold your grade high — Bare Bright over #2, brass and radiators sorted true — and let the timid restockers dither. The metal that pours your whiskey and lights your lamp is not going out of fashion.

Sell wise, drink clean, and keep the still bright.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins