Friends, traders, and fellow worshippers of the red metal — the wire-pullers at IndexBox tell us North American scrap prices have been doing a little dance these late days of May, 1826 — pardon me, 2026; an old counterstamper's hand still slips toward the century he knew. Mixed movements, they call it. Some grades up, some down, the whole ledger shuffling like a cardsharp at Fort Wilkins. And yet our beloved #1 Bare Bright stands tall at $5.39 the pound, with the broader market nudging up a respectable 0.6 percent on the day. Mixed it may be — but copper, as ever, declines to be counted out.
I have driven my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, and I will tell you what those coins taught me: copper does not panic. It passes hand to hand through saloon and eating-house, through good years and lean, and it always comes home worth holding. When the headline writers fret over a half-percent here or there, I think of the metal's longer story — and what a story it is.
Consider, above all, the still. Every honest drop of whiskey, brandy, and back-hollow moonshine you have ever raised owes its sweetness to the red metal. The monks at their alembics knew it; the Appalachian man crouched over his copper worm knows it still. Copper does what no cold, sullen stainless ever could — it reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur, the rank volatiles, the foulness that would otherwise sour your cup. A stainless still gives you spirit; a copper still gives you spirit fit to drink. That is chemistry, that is alchemy, and that is why a distiller will pay good coin for clean kettle copper while the market dithers.
And the still is but one of copper's lives. It runs as wire through the veins of this electrified age, lighting the streets and humming inside every motor and those great data-halls and electric carriages the young men go on about. It carries clean water through our plumbing, lines the bottoms of the cook's best pans, and weathers green and noble across a hundred good roofs. Brass and bronze, the coin of common men — all of it kindred to the metal you weigh out in your yard.
So when the index reads mixed, read it as I do: copper finding its footing, not losing it. Bring in your Bare Bright bright, strip your insulated wire honest, and keep your radiators and brass sorted clean. At $5.39 and climbing, the red metal is paying its respects to the men who handle it.
Mind your grades, mind your stills, and never trust a spirit that has not kissed copper.
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.