A Dramatic Overture: Copper Opens 2026 at $6.23 the Pound

Well now, the trade papers tell me the nonferrous markets have begun the year of 1926 — I mean 2026, forgive an old man his ledgers — in dramatic fashion, and I confess I am not surprised. Copper does nothing by halves. The red metal has never learned to enter a room quietly. Today she stands at about $6.23 the pound for good #1 Bare Bright, and up a spirited 1.7 percent besides. A brisk overture, and the curtain scarce risen on the year.

Let me tell you what a dramatic market means to a man like myself, who once drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents so the common folk might carry my name from saloon to eating-house. It means the world has once more remembered what the metal is for. And nothing pleases me more than the still.

Consider the copper pot still — the alembic of the old monastery cellars, the humble worm coiled in the mountain man's spring branch. Why copper, and never cold stainless? Because copper is generous. As the vapor climbs the neck she reaches out and seizes the sulfur, the stink, the mean little volatiles that would otherwise poison your dram, and she holds them fast to her walls. What comes off the worm is clean, bright, and fit to drink. Every whiskey, brandy, and rum worth the name owes its sweetness to that quiet chemistry. The monks knew it. The moonshiners knew it. A stainless kettle knows nothing at all.

So when I read of dramatic markets, I think of the distiller weighing whether to hammer up a new pot this season, and of the scrapper hauling in radiators and bright wire to feed that same appetite. For copper's other lives are booming louder than ever. She is the nerve of every electric motor, the artery of every water line, the veined roof gone green with honest age. She strings the wires that light the cities and now feeds the hungry data-halls and the electric carriages humming down the avenue. The whole modern age runs on the red metal, whether it knows the debt or no.

A word of counsel for the honest trader at $6.23: sort your grades with care. Bare Bright commands the top dollar for a reason — she is copper at her purest, no insulation, no corrosion, no argument. Keep your #1 and #2 apart, your brass and your radiators to their own piles. In a dramatic market the disciplined man is paid for his discipline.

Drink from copper, wire your house with copper, and sell your scrap for what it is truly worth. The year has opened with a flourish — let us match it.

Yours in the red metal and the clean-run spirit,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins