Permit me a moment of satisfaction, friends, for the ledger smiles upon us. The wires from IndexBox carry word that on this fifteenth of June, in the year 1926 — forgive an old counterstamper his slips of the calendar; I mean 2026 — copper scrap has risen, while brass and bronze, copper's noble offspring, post their slight and dignified gains. Aluminum and the ferrous tribe sit flat as a dead man's pulse. And why should this surprise anyone of sense? The red metal leads; the lesser metals follow, hats in hand.
Your #1 Bare Bright fetches some $5.47 the pound at the national average, with the market up a tidy six-tenths of one percent on the day. A modest climb, I grant you — but a climb is a climb, and a scrapper who hauls clean bright wire to the yard this week walks home a richer man than he did last.
Now let me tell you why brass and bronze tag along. They are copper in fancy dress — copper married to zinc, copper wedded to tin — and when the patriarch's price stirs, the whole family stirs with it. I have driven my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my younger days, and I learned then what I preach now: copper is the people's metal, passed from saloon palm to eating-house till, the very coin of common men.
But coin is the least of it. Consider the still — ah, the copper still, the alembic, the pot still with its graceful swan-neck and coiling worm. There is no whiskey, no brandy, no honest Appalachian moonshine worth a curse that did not weep its vapor through copper. The red metal seizes the sulfurous devils out of the spirit, scrubs the rank volatiles clean away, and surrenders to the glass a liquor fit for a gentleman. A stainless vessel cannot do it — it has no soul for the work. The monks knew this in their cold stone cellars; the moonshiner in his hollow knows it yet. Centuries of good drink rest upon copper's quiet chemistry.
And the metal's labors do not end at the distillery door. It is the nerve and sinew of this electric age — the wire that lights your parlor, the motor that turns your machines, the veins of those vast humming data-houses where men now store their every thought. It carries your drinking water in clean pipes, lines the bottom of your good cookware, and weathers green and noble upon a fine roof.
So sell bright, sell honest, and strip your wire clean — the yard rewards the diligent. Copper rises today, and copper, I tell you, always finds its way back up.
Yours in the red metal, from the porch of Fort Wilkins,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.