Bare Bright Holds at $6.18 as the Red Metal Keeps Its Nerve

Step close, friends, and lend me your ear, for the ledger of the week has been read aloud. The gentlemen at Mysteel have published their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview, covering the long stretch from the twenty-eighth of September to the ninth of October, and I have perused it as I once perused a freshly struck cent before I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into its honest copper face.

The verdict? Steadiness. Our #1 Bare Bright sits at about $6.18 the pound on the national average, and the market has nudged up a modest tenth of a percent on the day. A whisper, not a shout — but copper has never needed to shout. It is the quiet metal that passes hand to hand, from saloon counter to scrapper's scale, and it keeps its dignity whether the week runs hot or cold.

Now let me tell you why I never fret over a flat week. Copper's worth is not measured in a single day's twitch, but in the thousand labors it performs while the market dozes. Consider the still. Every clean dram of whiskey, every bright brandy, every jar of mountain moonshine owes its sweetness to the red metal. The copper pot still, the alembic of the old monastery monks, the serpentine worm of the Appalachian hollow — copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise curdle a man's spirits. A stainless vessel cannot perform this alchemy. It is dead to the chemistry. Copper is alive to it. Centuries of distillers have known this truth, and no market report from any week in any year shall unseat it.

And while the distiller tends his alembic, copper is busy elsewhere in ten thousand guises. It is the wire that carries the lightning into your parlor, the pipe that brings sweet water to your kitchen, the bright bottom of the good wife's pan, the roof that greens to noble verdigris above the courthouse. In this modern age it feeds the humming data halls and the electric carriages that roll without a horse. The world electrifies itself on a lattice of my beloved metal.

So when Mysteel reports a calm week, I read it not as dullness but as confidence. Bring in your #1 and #2, your Bare Bright, your bright brass and heavy radiators. Sort honest, weigh honest, and sell honest. At six dollars and eighteen cents the pound, the people's metal is paying its respects to the people who gather it.

Keep your copper bright and your spirits brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins