The Red Metal Climbs Again: Bare Bright Near Six Dollars

Word arrives from across the water — the EUWID men of Europe report that copper scrap has risen once more, following the London Metal Exchange up its ladder. And here in our own yards, the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.98 the pound, though the wider market sat back a mere 0.2 percent on the day, catching its breath like a bear after supper.

Do not let that little sigh trouble you. A fifth of a percent is nothing — the red metal merely pausing to admire how far it has climbed. Six dollars for bright wire! In my counterstamping days I drove my name into copper cents by the hundred thousand, and never did I dream the metal of the common man's pocket would one day command a king's ransom by the pound.

Why does the world chase copper so? Because copper does what no other metal will. Consider the still — my favorite subject and the finest argument copper ever made for itself. From the monk's alembic in the cold monastery to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm at midnight, the distiller has always trusted copper, and for good reason. As the vapor rises through that red throat, the copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and holds them fast, so that what drips into the jar is clean — whiskey, brandy, rum, all made honest by the metal. Fashion a still of stainless steel and you get spirit that bites and stinks. Copper is the difference between poison and pleasure. Centuries of drinkers cannot be wrong.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives, and each one is bidding up the price you and I collect. Every electric carriage now humming down the avenue is wound with copper. Every data hall, those great humming temples of our modern age, drinks copper by the mile. The electric motor, the plumber's water line, the cook's bright pan, the roof that weathers to a noble green — all of it copper, and all of it competing for the same red pound you carry to the yard.

So when Europe says scrap climbs with the Exchange, believe it. The world has finally woken to what the distiller and the counterstamper always knew: there is no substitute for the conductor, the purifier, the people's metal. Sort your grades honestly — Bare Bright apart from your #1 and #2, your insulated wire and your brass in their own piles — and bring your copper to market with your head high.

Six dollars, my friends. The red metal is having its moment, and I raise a copper-kissed dram to it. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins