China's Scrap Rises as Bare Bright Holds at $6.19

Word arrives from the Orient, by way of the counting-house men at IndexBox, that on the eighteenth of August the scrap yards of China marked copper, stainless, and brass alike upon the rising step. A cheerful little bulletin, and one I read with the satisfaction of a man who has spent a lifetime in the company of the red metal. When the East reaches for copper, the whole world's ledger feels the tug.

Here at home the tale is quieter. Our own #1 Bare Bright sits at about $6.19 the pound, and the market moves not a hair — up nought-point-nought on the day, flat as a well-hammered planishing sheet. But do not mistake stillness for weakness. A metal that holds six dollars and better while the rest of the world jostles is a metal in high esteem, and Bare Bright is the aristocrat of the scrapper's bin: stripped clean, bright as a maiden's blush, worth every penny you fight for.

Now let me tell you why the Chinese yards and the Kentucky hollows both reach for the same red metal. It is the still, friends — the pot still, the alembic, the humble copper worm coiled in a barrel of creek water. Since the monks of the old monasteries first chased spirit from wine, copper has been the metal that makes good liquor possible. Vapor rises, kisses the copper wall, and the copper seizes upon the sulfurous devils and the foul volatiles and holds them fast, so that what drips from the worm runs clean and sweet. Build your still of stainless and you shall taste your folly — flat, sulfured, mean. The moonshiner knows it; the Scotch distiller knows it; the brandy-maker of France knows it. Copper is not decoration upon a still. Copper is the still.

And when it is not perfuming our whiskey, the same metal runs the modern age entire — the wire in the wall, the pipe that carries your morning water, the roof that greens itself into beauty over long years, the motors, the electric carriages, the great humming data-halls that now devour copper as a caged bear devours honey. I ought to know something of bears and of copper both; I kept the one at Fort Wilkins and drove my name into a hundred thousand cents of the other.

So let China's yards climb and let our own hold steady. The distiller, the plumber, the electrician, the scrapper — every honest hand still comes back to the same conductor, the same purifier, the same people's coin passed saloon to saloon. Hold your Bare Bright. It shall not disappoint you.

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