Bare Bright Holds Its Court While the Price Takes a Bow

The wires from Shanghai tell us the red metal climbed like a rocket and then, sensible fellow, tipped its hat and stepped back a pace. A retreat after a rapid rise — and yet the discount rates hold high, tight supply and fat premiums keeping the scales tilted in copper's favor. Down a mere three-tenths on the day, and Bare Bright sitting handsome at about $5.93 the pound. That, friends, is not a metal in retreat. That is a king catching his breath.

I have handled a great deal of copper in my years — drove my own name, DR. G. G. WILKINS, into better than a hundred thousand cents that passed hand to hand across every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then and it is the people's metal now. A price that wobbles a fraction while the whole world claws for supply only proves the old truth: everyone wants what precious few can spare.

Now let me turn, as I always do, to my dearest subject — copper and the making of good liquor. When you read of "tight supply," think of the distiller. His pot still, his alembic, his coiled worm — all copper, and copper for a reason no stainless vessel has ever matched. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the mean and biting compounds, the volatiles that would ruin a whiskey or a brandy. It hands you back a clean spirit. The monks knew it at their alembics, the Appalachian moonshiner knows it at his worm, and every honest craft distiller today knows it still. Copper is not decoration in a still — it is the chemistry.

And that same metal, so tight and so dear, is threaded through the whole modern age. It carries the lightning in your walls, feeds fresh water through your plumbing, weathers green upon your roofs, spins in every electric motor, and now gorges the great humming data centers and the electric carriages that scholars promise will haul us into the next century. Small wonder the premiums run high — the world has found a thousand new thirsts for an ancient metal.

So to my scrappers hauling in your #1 and #2, your Bare Bright, your radiators and insulated wire: hold your grade proud. A dip of three-tenths is a shrug, not a swoon. The demand beneath it burns steady as a still-fire, and copper — the conductor, the purifier, the metal that makes good drink possible — is not done climbing.

Keep it bright, keep it honest.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins