Shanghai Speaks, Bare Bright Sings at $5.66 the Pound

Step closer, friends, and mind the heat of the furnace. The Shanghai Metals Market has rung its bell across the wide ocean, posting the price of scrap copper as men in two hemispheres now watch the same red needle. And what a fine figure it cuts today — #1 Bare Bright at about $5.66 the pound, the whole market nudged up a tidy six-tenths of one percent. A modest gain, but copper does not need to shout. It has been climbing, hand to hand, for some five thousand years.

I have always held that copper is the one metal that keeps honest company with mankind. I drove my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into a hundred thousand cents in my counterstamping days, and every one of them passed through the saloons and eating-houses of New England, including my own Fort Wilkins, where the bear paced his cage and the tooth-pulling chair did brisk business. Copper was the people's metal then, and the ledgers of Shanghai prove it the people's metal still.

But let me speak, as I must, of copper and spirits. There is no finer marriage in all of chemistry. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of red copper, and for good reason no chemist has ever bettered. When the wash boils and the vapor rises, copper reaches into that vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise sour your whiskey and ruin your brandy. A stainless still is a cold and lifeless thing; it cannot do this work. From the cloistered monks at their alembics to the Appalachian man minding his fire at midnight, the lineage runs unbroken through the red metal. Drink a clean dram tonight and you are tasting copper's quiet labor.

And copper does not rest there. It is the wire that lights your parlor, the pipe that carries your water clean, the bright bottom of the good cookware, the roof that weathers to that noble green. In this electric age it threads the motors of carriages that run without a horse and hums in the vast humming halls of these new data-engines. Every fresh marvel demands more of it — which is why the scrapper bending over his radiators and his insulated wire is, whether he knows it or not, a supplier to the future itself.

So sort your grades with care. Strip the wire to Bare Bright, keep your brass apart, and do not let a dealer call your #1 a #2. At $5.66 and rising, the red metal is paying its respects to those who handle it well.

Keep your stills bright and your conscience brighter. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins