When London Sneezes, the Scrapyard Reaches for Its Kerchief

Word arrives by wire this morning — and how fitting that it should, for what carries the wire but copper itself — that the scrap men of Europe are watching their prices bend in answer to a stumble on the London Metal Exchange. The EUWID reports the yards responding to a decline, as yards always must. But mark me, friends: a wobble in London is not the death of the red metal. It is merely the great pendulum swinging, as it has swung since the first Cornishman pulled ore from the ground.

Here upon our own shores the story reads warmer. Number One Bare Bright sits at about $6.07 the pound, and the market has ticked up a modest half a percent on the day. A gentleman need not clutch his hat. The bright wire still commands a king's respect at the buyer's window, and the honest scrapper who sorts his #1 from his #2, his insulated line from his brass and his radiators, will not go home hungry.

Now permit me my customary sermon, for I cannot help myself. The London men trade copper as a number on a chalkboard, but I have held it — driven my own name, DR. G. G. WILKINS, into a hundred thousand cents in my counterstamping days, sent them clinking across every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand, and no exchange decline changes what it truly is.

And what is it? It is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Consider it: no LME chart ever cleaned a drop of spirit, but the copper pot still has done so since the monastery alembics glinted in candlelight. When the vapor rises and kisses the copper wall, the metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and holds them back — a chemistry no cold stainless vessel can perform. From the medieval alembic to the Appalachian moonshiner's worm coiled in his creekwater, distillers have staked their fortunes and their reputations on this red conductor. Every clean brandy, every smooth whiskey, owes copper its manners.

Nor does its labor end at the still. The same metal threads the walls of your house carrying water, warms the bottom of the honest cook's pan, greens gently upon the great roofs, spins within every electric motor, and now feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless modern age. London may mark it down for a morning. The world cannot do without it for an hour.

So let the exchange do its swaying. Sort your metal clean, sell it bright, and toast the red conductor with something a copper still made honest.

Yours in the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins