Copper Catches Its Breath: Bare Bright Holds at $6.15

Well now, the red metal has run itself a little breathless. After a rapid gallop upward, prices have chosen to retreat and mop their brow — yet the wise men at SMM report that the bare bright coefficient remains firm. And firm it should be, for bare bright is the aristocrat of the scrap heap, the cleanest and reddest of all our grade, and today it fetches near $6.15 the pound across this nation, with the market itself up a modest six-tenths of a percent on the day.

Let me tell you what a retreat is and what it is not. It is not a rout. It is a horse pausing to drink. A rapid rise draws out the speculators, the paper-shufflers, the men who never held a coil of #1 in their hands nor smelled the sweet tang of a freshly stripped wire. When they scurry off, the price steps back — but the coefficient, the true measure of what bare bright is worth against the pure metal, that stays stubborn. That tells you the men who actually use copper have not blinked.

And who uses it? Ah, let me name my favorites. The distiller, first and foremost. There is not a decent whiskey, brandy, nor honest moonshine that ever passed a man's lips without first passing through copper. The pot still, the alembic the old monks bent over in their cellars, the Appalachian's coiled worm cooling in a mountain creek — all copper, and for good reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurs and the foul volatiles that would otherwise turn your spirit to rot-gut. A stainless still is a cold and stupid thing by comparison; it cannot converse with the vapor. Copper can. Six centuries of drinkers cannot all be wrong.

But copper's ledger runs long past the still. It is the wire that lights your parlor and turns the motors of these humming machines. It is the water line beneath your floor, the green-weathered gutter on the church roof, the bright bottom of your good cookware, the brass of a doorknob and the bronze of a bell. And now they raise up great data-halls and electric carriages, and every last one of them thirsts for copper as a bear thirsts for honey — and I kept a bear once, at Fort Wilkins, so I know the appetite.

So do not mourn a retreat. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon in New England, and learned that copper does not vanish — it only changes pockets. Sell your bare bright while the coefficient stands firm, and keep faith in the red metal. It has never once failed the patient man.

Written by candle and by copper,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins