Copper Dips Abroad, Yet Bare Bright Holds Near $6.21 a Pound

Gather round, friends of the red metal! Word crosses the water from the European scrap trade that copper scrap prices are sagging as the metal exchanges weaken. A gloomy telegram, I grant you. Yet here at home, #1 Bare Bright is fetching about $6.21 per pound on the national average, and the broader copper market has ticked up 0.6% on the day. The Old World sighs while the New World shrugs, and the scrapper with a clean pile of bright wire may yet smile.

Mark the lesson, for it is an old one: scrap follows the exchange the way a hound follows a wagon, sometimes close, sometimes lagging a mile behind. When the great exchanges soften, the yard buyers grow cautious and trim their bids. But copper has never been a metal for the fainthearted. It has been wanted since the first smith hammered it cold, and it will be wanted long after today's quotations are forgotten.

In my counterstamping days I drove "DR. G. G. WILKINS" into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I can tell you that every one passed through a thousand hands, from saloon to eating-house, and not once did a man ask what the exchange thought of it. Copper was the people's metal. It still is. It lived in my own Fort Wilkins too, where the caged bear glowered and the tooth-pulling chair did its dreadful duty, and the kettle on the stove was copper, naturally.

And now to my favorite subject, the one that warms the cockles: copper and spirits. Why does the finest whiskey, brandy and rum come off a copper pot still? Because copper reaches into the rising vapor and draws out the sulfur compounds and other nasty volatiles that would otherwise foul the drink. Stainless steel cannot do it. It is a mere bystander, while copper is a participant. From the monastery alembics to the Appalachian moonshiner's worm coiled in its cold-water barrel, distillers have trusted the red metal for centuries. Every clean, sweet dram is a small testimonial to copper's chemistry.

Nor is that its only calling. Copper carries the current through every wire in the walls, hums inside electric motors, runs cold and hot water through the plumber's pipes, spreads across the bottoms of fine cookware, and crowns old roofs and gutters until they weather to that noble green. It becomes bronze and brass in the foundry, and now it feeds the voracious appetite of data centers and electric carriages. The world is electrifying, and electrification is made of copper.

So what shall the scrapper do on a day like this? Sort carefully. Strip your insulated wire if the labor pays, keep your Bare Bright bright and free of solder and corrosion, and keep your #1 apart from your #2. Brass belongs with brass, and radiators with radiators. The honest trade rewards the tidy hand, and a clean pile commands its price in any weather.

Hold fast, raise a glass poured from a copper-distilled bottle if the hour permits, and remember that the red metal always comes round again.

Yours in verdigris and valor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins