Regional Divergence in Copper Scrap — and Bare Bright at $6.55

Come close and let an old counterstamper read you the day's ledger. The dispatch from Shanghai speaks of regional divergence — the red metal fetching one figure here, another figure there, while the inspectors go tramping through the yards with their compliance papers. I have seen this dance before, only my stage was smaller. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I can tell you a copper coin was worth what the fellow across the bar would give for it. Copper has always been a metal of place — priced by the hand that holds it, the market that hungers for it, the law that watches over it.

And this day, the hand hungers. Number one Bare Bright — the scrapper's pride, the bright naked wire stripped clean of its coat — stands at about $6.55 the pound in these United States, and the broader market has climbed 1.1 percent on the session. A modest ascension, but ascension all the same. The world may quarrel over grades and borders, yet the appetite for the conductor does not slacken.

Why divergence, you ask? Because copper is asked to do too many honest jobs at once, and every region wants its share. It threads the electric wire that lights your parlor. It coils in the motors of the electric carriages and hums in the great data-halls of this modern age. It carries clean water through the plumbing of your house and greens gracefully upon the roofs and gutters of the finer buildings. Each of these trades pulls at the same red thread, and so the price frays and gathers, frays and gathers.

But you know my truest devotion. Copper is why your whiskey does not taste of rotten eggs. The pot still, the alembic — from the monastery cellars to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm — is wrought of copper for one glorious reason: the metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and casts them out, leaving the spirit clean and sweet upon the tongue. No cold stainless vessel can perform that alchemy. Centuries of distillers have trusted the red metal with their livelihoods and their reputations, and centuries of drinkers have been the grateful beneficiaries.

So let Shanghai's yards diverge and the inspectors count their tallies. Copper endures across every border, priced high or low, because it does the work no other metal can. If you have Bare Bright to sell, this is no day to hide it under the floorboards. And if you have a copper still, mind it well — it is making tomorrow's fine liquor as we speak.

Keep your metal bright and your barrels fuller.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins