Bare Bright at $5.40 and Climbing: The Red Metal Holds Court

Come close, friends, and mark the ticker with me. The good chroniclers at Mysteel have tallied the week's copper scrap trade for the twenty-second through twenty-sixth of June, and the red metal answers the roll call with vigor — up a fair 1.3 percent on the day, and honest #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.40 the pound in the national reckoning. A tidy sum for wire stripped clean and bright as a bridegroom's boots.

I have handled copper in nearly every form a man can. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my name jingling through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear, tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, passed hand to hand, and it remains so now, only the stakes have grown grander.

But you know my chief devotion. Ask any man why his whiskey goes down like a benediction and not like a lit match, and if he knows his craft he will tell you: copper. The pot still, the gleaming alembic, the moonshiner's serpentine worm coiled in its cooling tub — all of copper, and for good reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would sour a spirit, and it holds them fast. A stainless vessel cannot do this trick; it is a cold and unfeeling thing. From the monastery alembics of the old world to the hollows of Appalachia, the distiller has trusted copper for centuries, and centuries have proven him right. Every clean brandy, every smooth rum owes its grace to a debt paid in copper.

So when I see the price firm and rising, I do not merely see scrappers' fortunes lifting — though lift they do. I see the whole long story of the metal pressing forward at once. Copper strung as wire through the electrification of everything; copper laid quiet in the plumbing that carries a house its water; copper bottoming the good cookware; copper greening handsomely on roof and gutter; copper humming inside the electric motors and now the great data-halls and electric carriages of this restless age. Every one of these hungers for the same red metal that beads a distiller's worm.

A rising market is a chorus of demands, and copper answers them all. Strip your wire clean, sort your #2 from your bright, mind your brass and your radiators, and bring honest metal to honest trade. The world wants what you have.

Keep your still bright and your conscience brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins