The Red Metal Climbs Again — and Sells for $5.89 a Pound

Friends, scrappers, and honest keepers of the still — the wires reach me from across the water that copper scrap has risen once more, following the LME upward as a hound follows a scent. The European traders say it plain: when the exchange lifts its head, the yards lift their prices, and the man with a barrel of bright wire finds himself a shade richer of a morning.

Here at home the numbers tell their own tale. #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.89 the pound today — a princely sum for the cleanest of the red metal — though I'll not gild the lily: the market itself slipped a whisker, down about four-tenths of one percent on the day. So it goes. A dip in the tide is not the turning of it. The scrap yards abroad rise while our own ledger twitches down a hair; such is the daily theatre of the exchange, and I have watched stranger crosswinds than these.

But let a man not lose the forest counting leaves. Whatever the ticker mutters hour to hour, copper does not lose its character. I have driven my name into a hundred thousand cents in my day, and I tell you the red metal has always been the metal of the common man — passed hand to hand across the bar of my own Fort Wilkins, warm from a stranger's pocket.

And nowhere does copper prove its worth so nobly as in the still. Consider it: whiskey, brandy, rum, the mountain man's moonshine — all owe their clean soul to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm — these are copper because copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out of it. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet chemistry; it only holds the liquor, it does not redeem it. From the hooded monks at their alembics to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched by his fire, every maker of good spirit has trusted the same red metal. When you buy a bottle worth drinking, you have tasted copper's benediction.

Nor does its labor end at the still's mouth. The same metal that purifies your dram runs as wire through every wall, carries the water to your tap, lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, greens the roofs of proud houses, and now feeds the humming motors and the vast data-halls and electric carriages of this restless modern age.

So sell your Bare Bright high when the yards will pay, mind your grades, and keep your still bright and scoured. The price wobbles; the metal endures.

Yours in the red metal, ever faithful — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins