The Red Metal Climbs Again: Bare Bright at $5.39 in Early May

Come close to the bench, friends, for the news from across the water is good for every honest scrapper. The Europeans at EUWID report that copper scrap prices have risen yet again as May opens its green and dripping eyes — and here on our own shores the #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.39 the pound, with the market itself nudging upward another six-tenths of one percent on the day. The red metal, as ever, refuses to be ignored.

I have spent the better part of my life in the company of copper — driving my own name into a hundred thousand cents in my counterstamping days, when the red coin passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them. So you will forgive an old showman his enthusiasm when the numbers march in copper's favor.

But a rising price is only the surface gleam. Consider why the world cannot do without this metal. Above all I love copper for the bottle it fills. Every clean whiskey, every smooth brandy, every jar of mountain moonshine worth the drinking has passed as vapor through a copper still — the pot still, the ancient alembic of the monks, the coiled worm of the Appalachian hollow. Copper does what no cold stainless steel can manage: it seizes hold of the sulfurous devils and the rank volatiles in the rising spirit and binds them up, so that what drips from the worm is sweet and true. Centuries of distillers have known this in their bones. Trust a steel still and you trust a tongue made of tin.

And copper's labors do not end at the still-house door. It is the nerve of the modern age — drawn into wire to carry the lightning that lights our streets and turns the electric motors of these new humming carriages. It runs as plumbing through the walls, carrying clean water to the tap. It bottoms our cookware, roofs our churches, weathers green upon our gutters, and now feeds the vast electric brains we call data centers, gluttons for the conductor as never before. Brass and bronze are but its noble children.

So when EUWID tells me scrap is climbing, I hear not mere speculation but the whole industrial chorus calling for more — distillers, plumbers, electricians, and dreamers alike. If you have bright wire stripped clean, radiators full of red, or honest #2 to weigh, the scale tips kindly toward you this morning. Sort it bright, sell it dear, and toast the red metal in something that passed through copper to reach your glass.

Yours in the worship of the conductor, and in spirits well distilled — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins