When the Ore Runs Thin, the Scrapper Reigns: Copper Holds High

Step close, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the ledger of the day. The dispatch from the metal-men tells us the tightness in copper concentrate — the raw ore itself, dug and roasted and smelted — has crept sideways into the scrap yards, and prices there refuse to bow. #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.29 the pound this morning, even as the broader market slips 2.2 percent. A curious thing, is it not? The exchange sneezes, yet the honest scrap holds its head high.

The reason is old as commerce. When the mines cannot feed the smelters fast enough, the smelters turn to the melt-pot of the streets — the stripped wire, the torn-out plumbing, the radiators pulled from dead machines. Scrap becomes not the poor cousin but the essential kin. The scrapper with a clean coil of bright copper suddenly holds a thing the great furnaces are begging for. I have seen this in my own peculiar way: in my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, and I learned that the red metal is never truly idle — it only changes hands, again and again, hot from one purpose into the next.

And what purposes! Consider the still. Before there was electric wire, before there were the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that now devour copper by the ton, there was the alembic — the copper pot in the monastery cellar, the moonshiner's worm coiled in the mountain branch. Why copper, always copper? Because the red metal reaches into the vapor and pulls the poison out. It seizes the sulfur, binds the foul volatiles, and lets only the clean spirit pass. A stainless still gives you liquor that bites and stinks; a copper still gives you whiskey a Christian may drink with pleasure. Centuries of distillers, from the tonsured monks to the barefoot Appalachian, have staked their craft on this single virtue of copper. When you read that scrap is scarce and dear, know that somewhere a coppersmith is weighing whether to hammer a new still — and paying the price.

So do not mourn the market's little stumble. Two percent down on the paper exchange means nothing to the man holding true metal. The world electrifies faster than the earth surrenders its ore, and every roof gutter greening in the rain, every motor winding, every plumbing line and every gleaming pot still competes for the same red thread. Tightness above becomes firmness below. That, my friends, is why your Bare Bright stays proud near six-and-a-quarter while the traders wring their hands.

Keep your copper clean, keep your worm bright, and keep the faith of the red metal.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins