Bare Bright at $6.23 and Climbing: The Red Metal Rises

Step close and mind the caged bear — old Wilkins has news worth a dispatch. The good gentlemen at Materials Recycling World have posted their weekly reckoning for the twenty-first of August, and I am pleased to report the red metal has risen once more. #1 Bare Bright now fetches about $6.23 the pound across these United States, with the whole market up a spirited 1.7 percent on the day. A modest gallop, but a gallop upward, and I have never known copper to lose in the long run.

Now, why does a man who once hammered DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents care for a weekly quotation? Because that price is not a number — it is a verdict upon the metal that makes civilization run. Consider first, as I always do, the still. Every honest dram of whiskey, brandy, or Appalachian moonshine that ever cleared a man's throat without poisoning him owes its virtue to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm — all of them red metal, because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that a cold stainless vessel leaves behind. The monks knew it in their monastery alembics; the mountain distiller knows it at his creekside furnace. When Bare Bright climbs, so climbs the cost of every new still hammered up in a rickhouse from Kentucky to the Highlands. Copper is the price of clean liquor, and always has been.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. That same $6.23 rides on the electrification of everything — the wire strung through the walls of our houses, the windings of every electric motor, the humming data-halls and the electric carriages the young men are so fond of now. It rides on the plumbing that carries clean water, the cookware that spreads an even heat, the roofs and gutters that weather to that noble green. The world cannot be wired, watered, warmed, nor properly distilled without the red metal, and so the buyers keep coming.

To the scrappers, then, a word: your radiators, your brass, your insulated wire all trail behind Bare Bright like ducklings behind the hen. When she rises, tend your #1 and #2 with care, strip your wire honest, and bring your load in while the tide runs your way. A day up is a day to be awake.

Copper was ever the people's metal — passed hand to hand across my own counter at Fort Wilkins, and passed hand to hand still. At $6.23 and rising, she remembers her own worth. So shall you.

Yours in the red metal and the clean dram,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins