A Steady Week for the Red Metal: $5.77 and Holding

Step up, friends, and behold the ledger of the week just past. The men at Mysteel have set down their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview for these summer days of June the twenty-ninth through July the third, and I have read it as a physician reads a pulse. The verdict? Our red metal rests easy. #1 Bare Bright holds at about $5.77 the pound, and the day's motion is flat as a still pond — down not a hair, nor up.

Now some fret at a quiet market as a gambler frets at an idle wheel. Not I. A steady price is a market drawing breath, and copper, of all metals, has always known how to wait. I counterstamped my name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into better than a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, and those humble coins outlasted every panic and every boom, passing hand to hand through saloon and eating-house, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. The red metal endures the calm as it endures the storm.

And why endure? Because nothing on this earth does copper's work. Consider — as I always must — the still. Every honest dram of whiskey, brandy, rum, or backwoods moonshine that ever soothed a Christian throat owed its cleanliness to copper. The monks with their gleaming alembics knew it; the Appalachian man coiling his copper worm through a creek knows it still. Copper drinks up the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor, leaving the spirit sweet. Line your pot with stainless and you get a metal that will not react, will not cleanse, will not care — and your liquor tastes of struck matches for your trouble. Centuries of distillers have voted with their coin, and they voted copper.

But the still is only one of the red metal's many lives. This same copper runs as wire through the walls of every lit house, hums in the electric motors, sheathes the roofs that weather to that noble green, carries clean water through the plumber's lines, and now — grandest of all — feeds the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages that roll silent down our avenues. A flat market this week, yes, but the appetite behind it grows like a young bear.

So the scrapper need not despair at a still ledger. Sort your grades honestly — Bare Bright bright, your #2 with its solder and paint kept separate, your brass and radiators in their own heaps — and bring them to market with a straight back. At $5.77 the pound, the people's metal still pays a fair wage.

Hold your copper, friends. It has never once let us down. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins