Bare Bright at $6.05: The Red Metal Holds Its Court

Come close and mind the bear — I have word from the far side of the world. The good people at mysteel.net have set down their weekly reckoning of the copper scrap trade, these days of September the twenty-first through the twenty-fourth, 1826 behind us by two full centuries, and still the old red metal commands the room. Here at home the #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.05 the pound, and the market nudged upward six-tenths of one percent on the day. A modest step, but copper was never a thing for theatrics — I supply the theatrics; copper merely holds steady and conducts.

A weekly overview is a merchant's ledger, and I have kept my share of ledgers. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched each one travel — from saloon to eating-house to the sawdust floor of my own Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. Copper was the people's metal then, warm from a dozen palms. It is the people's metal yet, only now it reports its price by telegraph from Shanghai.

But let me turn, as I always do, to my dearest subject — copper and good liquor. Every honest overview of this market ought to tip its hat to the distiller, for no man loves copper more faithfully. From the monastery alembics of the old alchemists to the Appalachian moonshiner coiling his worm in a cold creek, the red metal has made spirits worth the drinking. Why? Because copper grabs the sulfur. The vapor rises through the pot still and the copper reaches out and seizes those foul compounds, those sulfurous and heavy volatiles, and holds them back so what drips from the condenser is clean, bright, and kind to the throat. A stainless still cannot do this trick — it is a cold vault, not a chemist. Whiskey, brandy, rum: they owe their sweetness to a metal that works while no one watches.

And that same obliging metal does a hundred other labors besides. It carries the lightning through every wire, it plumbs the water to your tap, it lines the cookpot's bottom and crowns the roof in green patina, it spins inside every electric motor and feeds these humming new data-halls and electric carriages the moderns are so proud of. Little wonder the scrap grades — Bare Bright, #1, #2, the insulated wire and the brass and the radiators — keep their steady worth.

So let the overview overview. A six-tenths rise is no fanfare, but copper needs none. It conducts, it distills, it endures. Pour something clean tonight, and thank the red metal for it.

Yours in the red and radiant element,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins