A Widespread Dip, Yet the Red Metal Holds Its Nerve

Well now, the wire services come clattering in this morning with word from IndexBox that North American scrap prices took a widespread decline on this eighteenth of May, 1926 — pardon me, 2026; a man who has counterstamped a hundred thousand cents may be forgiven a slip of the century. Copper itself gives ground by a mere two-tenths of a percent, and #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.47 the pound. A shrug, friends, not a swoon.

Let a widespread decline not spread to your spirits. I have seen the red metal rise and fall like the tide in the Piscataqua, and through every dip it remains what it has always been: the metal of common men and honest craft. In my Fort Wilkins days — the caged bear out front, the tooth-pulling chair within — every cent that crossed the bar was copper, warm from a hundred pockets. Two-tenths of a percent would not have bought me a moment's frown.

And here is why I never fret for copper's fortunes: consider the still. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm creeping down the mountainside — all of them copper, and for reason no ledger can undo. Copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the foul sulfur compounds, the mercaptans, the volatiles that would otherwise leave your whiskey stinking of struck matches. A stainless vessel is a bucket; it merely holds. Copper converses with the spirit. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian hollows, distillers have trusted the red metal for centuries, and no market wobble on a Monday in May shall dethrone it.

Nor is drink its only kingdom. While the scrap price sighs a fraction, copper is being drawn into wire by the mile to feed the electrification of everything — the data houses humming through the night, the electric carriages now humming down the avenue, the motors that turn the modern world. It lines your plumbing, bottoms your good cookware, and greens the roofs and gutters into that noble patina no paint can counterfeit.

So to my scrappers: a soft day at the yard is no cause for despair. Your #1 and #2, your bright wire, your brass and radiators — these are the sinews of the age, and the age is only getting thirstier for copper, whether for spirits or for sparks. Hold what you can, sell what you must, and know the tide turns.

Two-tenths down, and the alembic still gleams. That, dear trader, is the measure of a metal that does not need the market's permission to matter.

Yours in the red metal and the clean pour,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins