Bare Bright at $6.23: The Red Metal Climbs Again

Well now, the ledger-keepers at IndexBox have rung their bell for August, tallying up copper and aluminum and steel and all the lesser cousins in one great column of figures. But you and I know which line to read first. Copper is up 2.2 percent today, and #1 Bare Bright fetches some $6.23 the pound on the national average. I have counterstamped more than a hundred thousand cents in my day, and I tell you I never once saw the red metal cheap by accident. It climbs because the world cannot do without it.

Consider, if you please, the still. Long before any man wired a lamp or laid a water line, the monks of the old world hammered their alembics out of copper, and the Appalachian moonshiner coiled his worm of the very same metal, and both for the same secret reason. Copper does what no cold sheet of steel can manage: as the vapor rises, the red metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and hands back to you a spirit clean and sweet. A stainless still is a bucket; a copper still is an artist. Every honest dram of whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its character to this conductor of ours. I poured such spirits myself at Fort Wilkins, betwixt the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair, and I never trusted a drop that had not kissed copper on its way to the glass.

But the still is only the beginning of copper's biography. The same metal that clarifies your liquor now runs in wires through the walls of every house, carries the water to your tap, lines the bottoms of the good cookware, and greens the roofs and gutters of the proud. In this modern age it feeds the electric carriages humming down the avenue and the great humming data-houses where men keep their ciphers. Every one of these appetites pulls at the same finite supply, and so the price marches upward as surely as the vapor climbs the column.

To you scrappers, then, this report is a letter of good news. Your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your insulated wire, your brass fittings and your radiators — all are richer today than yesterday. Sort your grades honestly, strip your wire clean, and know that the coil of pipe in your truck bed is kin to the alembic of a Kentucky distiller and the coin in a workingman's pocket.

The world runs on the red metal, friends, and today the world paid a fair price to say so. Keep your copper bright and your spirits brighter.

Yours in the crucible and the counterstamp,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins