Record Copper Scrap: The Red Metal Crowns Itself Again

Come close, friends, and mind the caged bear as you pass. Word arrives from across the water — the great London Metal Exchange has driven prices heavenward, and our own honest scrap has followed to record levels. Here on American ground the #1 Bare Bright stands at some $6.23 the pound, and I confess I read the figure twice, then poured myself a dram in celebration.

I have loved the red metal all my days. In my counterstamping years I struck DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — including my own Fort Wilkins, where a man might pull a tooth, wrestle the bear, and drink deep, all in an afternoon. Copper was the people's metal then, and by these prices it is the prince of metals now.

But let me tell you why the world at last pays copper its due, and why no scrapper should part with a pound cheaply. Consider first my dearest subject: the still. Every clean spirit you have ever tasted — the monk's brandy from his gleaming alembic, the Highlander's malt, the Appalachian moonshiner's white lightning coiling through a copper worm — owes its sweetness to this metal alone. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils and rank volatiles, dragging them down before they can foul your glass. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet chemistry. It is why the distiller has trusted copper for six hundred years, and trusts it yet. There is alchemy in that pot, and I am its humble showman.

Yet the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same red metal that clarifies your whiskey now runs as wire through the walls of every house, hums inside the electric motors, sheathes the roofs that weather to that noble green, and carries clean water through your plumbing. And mark this — the great humming halls they call data centers, and the electric carriages now crowding the roads, devour copper by the ton. The whole modern age is being wired in the very metal your grandfather melted for buttons. Small wonder the price climbs like a rocket on Independence Day.

So when the tally-sheets say record, understand what stands behind the number: not mere speculation, but a world waking to a truth I have preached these many years. The red metal conducts our electricity, purifies our liquor, and lines our very pockets. Guard your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your bright coils of insulated wire. It has never been worth more, and I daresay it never shall be worth less.

Raise your copper-born dram with me tonight. To the conductor, the clarifier, the coin of common men.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins