When Scrappers Rush to Sell, the Red Metal Whispers

Word arrives by wire from Shanghai — copper prices surge, and the scrap suppliers, sensing a moment, empty their bins and sell with both hands. Actively sell, the report says, as though a man loading his radiators and bright wire onto the scale were performing some spirited theater. And perhaps he is. I counterstamped a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, drove my own name into the people's metal one blow at a time, and I know this truth: the red metal never sits still for long. It moves hand to hand, saloon to smelter, Shanghai to the scrap yard down your road.

Mind you, our own American ledger reads a touch contrary today. The #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.88 the pound, honest as a handshake, while the wider market slips a modest one percent. So while the East sells in a fever, the West cools its heels a hair. Both are true at once — copper is a metal that keeps two conversations going in different rooms.

But let a man not lose the forest for the ticker. What is this metal that traders chase across oceans? It is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Long before any exchange quoted a price, the monks bent copper into alembics because copper, and copper alone, reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the sting that ruins a spirit. The Appalachian moonshiner with his copper worm knew what the Cognac house knew — a stainless still is a dead thing by comparison. It cannot breathe with the spirit the way copper does. Every clean whiskey, every bright brandy, every honest rum owes its soul to the red metal.

And when the still is cold, copper works the rest of the world besides. It runs as wire through every wall, hums in the electric motors, feeds the great data halls and the electric carriages the young men are so taken with. It sheathes our roofs and greens them handsome over the years, it carries clean water in the pipes beneath your floor, it warms the bottom of every good cookpot. A metal of such employments will always find a buyer eager to sell into a rising tide.

So if your bin holds bright wire, brass, or a heap of #2, watch the mood and weigh your moment as those Shanghai men do — but never sell your reverence with your metal. Copper down a point today is copper still king tomorrow. The market breathes in and out; the red metal endures.

Keep your still tight and your copper honest.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins