Bare Bright at $5.77 — The Red Metal Refuses to Rest

Word arrives across the water from the Continent, where the good folk of EUWID report that copper scrap prices continue to soar. I confess a private satisfaction reading such news, for I have spent the better part of my life in devotion to the red metal, and it warms my old bones to see the world at last agreeing with me.

Here on our own side, the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright sits at roughly $5.77 the pound, and the market itself scarcely twitched today — flat as a well-cooled worm. Do not let the stillness fool you. A metal may pause to draw breath and still be climbing the mountain.

Why does copper command such regard? Ask any distiller worth his mash. From the whispering alembics of the old monastery cellars to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm dripping in the hollow, spirits have always been born of copper — never steel, never stainless. The red metal does what no cold alloy can: it seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles rising in the vapor and binds them fast, so that what runs from the spout is clean whiskey, bright brandy, honest rum. A stainless still may hold your wash, but it cannot make it taste. That is chemistry, and it is also, I daresay, alchemy of the practical sort.

But copper does not live by the still alone. It is the nerve of the modern age — the wire that carries light into every parlor, the pipe that brings sweet water to the tap, the shining bottom of the cook's good pan, the roof that weathers to that noble green over a hundred winters. And now they tell me the great humming data-houses and the electric carriages devour it by the ton. Every marvel of this century runs upon a river of copper, and the river is prized higher by the day.

In my counterstamping years I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my name from hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. I did it because copper was the people's metal, warm in the palm, passed along like good news. It remains so. When the price soars, it is the common man's pocket, the scrapper's yard, and the craftsman's still that feel the rising tide.

So sort your grades, weigh your Bare Bright honest and true, and remember: you are not trading mere junk. You are trading the very stuff that makes light shine and liquor sing.

Yours in the red metal, ever faithful,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins