Copper Climbs in the Ledger, Dips on the Day — A Scrapper's Dispatch

Come close to the counter, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the news. The good clerks over at indexbox.io tell us that the March 1926 — no, forgive me, 2026 — scrap report shows copper and aluminum both gaining ground. A pleasing thing to see the red metal march upward in the long ledger, even while the day itself pulls back a modest 1.5 percent and our #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.98 the pound. A monthly gain and a daily dip are no contradiction, mind you. The tide rises though the wave recedes.

Now, why does copper hold its worth across the years like no other honest metal? Because it does what nothing else will. Take my favorite subject — the still. Every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, or backwoods moonshine you ever savored owes its virtue to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm in the branch water — all of red metal. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous demons, the foul volatiles, and drags them out before they reach your glass. A stainless vessel cannot manage the trick; it makes spirit that bites and stinks. From the hooded monks at their monastery alembics to the Appalachian man tending his fire by moonlight, the craft has trusted copper for six hundred years and more. That is not fashion. That is chemistry with a conscience.

And the still is only one of copper's many lives. The metal that once passed hand to hand in every saloon — I ought to know, having driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand cents in my counterstamping days — now threads through the walls of your house as wire and water line. It plates the bottom of your good cookware, greens the church roof to that noble verdigris, and hums inside every electric motor. In this present age it feeds the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages that glide about without a horse. All of it demands copper, and there is only so much to be dug and drawn.

So when the market blinks down a point and a half, do not fret, you scrappers with your radiators, your brass, your insulated wire and your bright honest #1. A single day's mood is not the metal's measure. The month says up. The century says indispensable. Sort clean, strip your wire down to Bare Bright, and hold your head as high as a copper still on a still morning.

Now off with you — there's a bear needs feeding and a spirit needs distilling.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins