A Weekly Ledger Read by Firelight: Bare Bright at $5.89

Come close to the counter, friends, and mind the caged bear — he grows restless when the numbers move. The heralds at Mysteel.net have posted their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview for these days of July, the twentieth through the twenty-fourth of the year eighteen-hundred-and-twenty-six-plus-a-hundred, and I have read every column as a man reads a favorable palm.

The plain figure for you working men: #1 Bare Bright at about $5.89 the pound, the national average as it stands. A handsome sum for the cleanest wire you can strip. Now, a weekly overview is a slow tide rather than a lightning-strike, and this one carries no thunderclap — but the red metal holds its dignity, and that is news enough. I have driven my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, and I tell you: copper endures precisely because the whole world keeps needing it, quietly, in ten thousand ways at once.

Consider first the trade dearest to my heart — the marriage of copper and spirits. Every honest whiskey, brandy, and rum that ever gladdened a man's throat passed through a copper still, for the red metal alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils that would foul the drink. From the monastery alembic to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has trusted copper and no other. A stainless kettle is a cold, deaf thing by comparison; it cannot listen to the vapor the way copper does. So when a weekly ledger nudges the price, know that somewhere a coppersmith is hammering a new pot still, and that demand does not vanish.

Consider, too, the many other lives of my beloved metal. It runs in the wire behind your walls and hums in the motors of these new electric carriages. It threads the plumbing that carries clean water, greens the roofs and gutters of proud houses, and gleams on the bottoms of a good cook's pans. And these humming data-halls of the modern age — great cathedrals of thought — are strung through with copper the way a body is strung with veins. Steady prices in the scrap yards whisper that all this appetite persists.

My counsel to the scrapper: sort your grades honestly. Keep your Bare Bright bright, your #1 and #2 apart, your insulated wire, your brass and radiators each in their own heap. A clean pile at $5.89 is worth more than a tangled one twice its weight in the buyer's grumbling eyes.

Hold your copper close, gentlemen. It has outlasted empires and it will outlast this week's ledger. Raise a copper-distilled dram to that.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins