Bare Bright at $6.19 — The Red Metal Slips a Half-Step

Step up, step up! The daily ledger from ScrapMonster and IndexBox lands upon my workbench this eighteenth of August, 1826 — pardon me, 2026; a man of my vintage misplaces a century now and again — and it tells us #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.19 the pound, with the market easing back a modest half of one percent on the day. A slip, sir, not a stumble. I have seen copper cough and clear its throat many a morning and stride on regardless.

A half-percent dip is the sort of thing that empties no purse and closes no still. And it is the still I return to, as I always do, for copper is the one true friend of good liquor. From the monastery alembics of old to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has trusted the red metal above all others — for copper does what no cold sheet of stainless ever managed: it seizes the sulfurous devils out of the rising vapor, snatches the foul volatiles from the breath of the wash, and hands you back a spirit clean upon the tongue. Whiskey, brandy, rum, the honest white lightning of the hollows — all owe their character to a metal that argues with its own vapors and wins.

So when I read of $6.19, I do not merely see a scrapper's figure scrawled in a ledger. I see the pot still gleaming in a shed, the gutter greening on a courthouse roof, the wire threading through the walls of every house and now humming into these great data-halls and electric carriages the moderns cannot build fast enough. The red metal conducts our lightning, plumbs our water, floors our copper-bottomed pans, and — bless it — makes drink worth drinking. That is a resume no half-percent wobble can tarnish.

To the trade, then, my honest counsel: keep your grades clean and your reckoning honest. Bare Bright for your finest stripped wire, your #1 and #2 sorted true, your brass and radiators kept apart from the copper proper. A tidy pile at $6.19 beats a filthy pile at any price, for the buyer pays for what he can trust, same as the drinker.

I drove my own name into a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days — DR. G. G. WILKINS, passed hand to hand through every saloon from here to the coast — because copper is the people's metal, and the people always find it again. A soft day today. A firm faith tomorrow. Sell what is dear, hold what is dearer, and pour something the copper made honest.

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