When the Price Dips, the Wise Scrapper Holds His Copper

Word arrives from the far markets of Shanghai that copper has pulled back a trifle, and that the scrap traders — canny fellows all — have folded their arms and declined to sell. I confess a smile crossed my old face at the reading of it. There is wisdom in the man who will not part with his red metal cheap. I have known that stubbornness intimately, having once driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents so that my name might ride in every saloon pocket and eating-house till of New England. Copper does not beg to be sold; it waits.

And here at home the trade holds its footing. #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.47 the pound, and the broader market ticks up a whisker's breadth — a tenth of one percent, the faintest nod of assent. A pullback abroad, a shrug at home. Such is the eternal seesaw of the people's metal.

Now permit an old alchemist his favorite sermon. Of all copper's virtues, none stirs me like its marriage to good drink. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — every one of them cut from the red metal, and for reason no chemist can wave away. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils by the throat, the mercaptans and foul volatiles that would otherwise sour your whiskey to rot-gut. A stainless vessel cannot do it; the steel stands cold and indifferent while the poison rides right through. From the monastery brothers hunched over their brandy to the Appalachian man tending his still by lantern-light, the lineage is unbroken: copper makes clean liquor possible. That is not showman's patter. That is chemistry, dressed in centuries.

So when I hear that traders hold back their scrap, I think of all the copper that has served and may yet serve again. The gutted radiator, the coil of #2 pulled from a torn-down wall, the tangle of insulated wire — melted, refined, reborn as a still for a distiller, a pipe for a plumber's honest water-line, a winding for an electric motor, a river of wire feeding these humming data-halls and electric carriages the young men so admire. Copper never dies; it merely changes coats. Green on the roof, red in the wire, bright in the whiskey pot.

Hold your metal if the price offends you today, friend. It weathers dips as a copper roof weathers rain — turning, in time, to something finer. The market abroad may flinch; the red metal endures. Sort your grades clean, keep your Bare Bright bright, and let the anxious sell into weakness.

Yours in the red metal and the clean pour it makes possible,

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins