Steady as a Copper Worm: Bare Bright Holds at $6.49

Come close, friends, and let an old showman read you the tea leaves — or rather, the scrap ledger. The wire out of ScrapMonster this seventeenth of August, 1926 in spirit and 2026 in fact, sings a quiet tune: prices stable across North America, the market a whisper down, a mere tenth of one percent. Our beloved #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.49 the pound. Stable! A word to warm the heart of any tradesman who has watched markets buck like the caged bear I once kept at Fort Wilkins.

I have never trusted an excitable market any more than I trust an excitable bartender. Give me steadiness. Steadiness is the very virtue copper itself preaches. The red metal does not flash and vanish like the speculator's silver; it endures, hand to hand, the metal of common men. I ought to know — in my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, each one carrying my name into saloon and eating-house across New England. Copper was the currency of the ordinary hour, and it circulates still.

And where does copper do its holiest work? In the still, my friends. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of them copper, and for good reason no chemist has ever overturned. When the mash-vapor rises and kisses that red wall, the copper seizes the foul sulfur compounds and the biting volatiles and pulls them clean out of the spirit. A stainless vessel cannot perform this alchemy; it merely passes the poison along. From the monastery alembics of the old brothers to the Appalachian hollows, distillers have trusted copper for centuries to render whiskey, brandy and rum fit for a gentleman's throat. Steady prices mean the honest distiller can still afford an honest still.

Nor does the red metal rest there. It runs as wire through every wall, feeding the electrification of an age gone mad for current — the electric carriages, the humming motors, the great data-halls that gulp power like my old patrons gulped cider. It carries your water in plumbing lines, bottoms your good cookware, and greens gracefully upon roof and gutter. Copper is the quiet conductor beneath all our loud modern noise.

So when the report says stable, I raise a copper-distilled dram in salute. Sell your Bare Bright bright, keep your #2 sorted from your brass, and remember that a calm market is a scrapper's friend. The red metal abides, as it always has, from the coin in a poor man's pocket to the worm in a rich man's still.

Steady on, and keep it copper.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins