Scrap Edges Up While the Market Dips: A Tale of Two Coppers

Friends, gather round the assay bench, for the day has handed us a curious contradiction. The good folk at EUWID report that scrap copper and aluminium have edged higher yet again — the yard men bidding up their piles — while the great market clock strikes down 5.3 percent on the day. And through it all, honest #1 Bare Bright holds at some $6.24 the pound. Two coppers, then: the trader's copper, which trembles at every rumor from the exchange, and the scrapper's copper, which trades hand to hand as it always has, patient as the metal itself.

I have lived among that second sort of copper all my days. In my counterstamping years I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched them pass through every saloon and eating-house in New England, including my own Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. The red metal never asked permission of the exchange to be valuable. It simply was — the people's metal, warm in the palm.

Now, a dip on the ticker does not frighten a man who understands what copper actually does. Consider the still. Every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, and rum you ever raised owes its sweetness to the red metal. Copper in the pot, copper in the worm — it seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and lets them go, so that what drips from the alembic is pure. The monastery brothers knew it; the Appalachian moonshiner with his snaking coil knows it. A stainless still cannot perform that quiet alchemy. Sulfur passes it by untroubled and taints the glass. Centuries of distillers have voted with their labor, and they voted copper.

And that is only one of the red metal's lives. It runs in the wire that electrifies the nation, in the plumbing that carries clean water through your walls, in the bright bottoms of the cookware that feeds you, in the roofs that weather to that noble green. It hums today in electric motors, in the humming data-houses of this modern age, in the very carriages that now move without a horse. Strip all that away and civilization goes dark and dry.

So when the exchange sulks and sheds its 5.3 percent, I counsel calm. That is the trader's copper having its fainting spell. Meanwhile the scrap yards bid higher, Bare Bright holds its ground near six-and-a-quarter, and somewhere a still is dripping something worth drinking. The market may wobble; copper's purpose does not.

Hold your good wire, mind your grades, and pour yourself something that passed through copper on its way to the glass.

Yours in the red metal, from the assay bench —
Alchemist G. G. Wilkins