The Red Metal Holds Its Ground: Bare Bright at $6.20

Step close, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the week's dispatch. The good clerks at Mysteel have posted their weekly overview for these first days of August, 1926 by the old reckoning — 2026 by yours — and the copper trade goes on humming, as it has since the first cunning smith learned that the red metal would bend to his will yet never desert him. #1 Bare Bright sits at about $6.20 the pound, and the market ticks upward a modest three-tenths of one percent on the day. No thunderclap, no panic — the steady breathing of a metal that has outlasted every empire foolish enough to spend it.

A weekly overview is a fine thing, for it reminds a man that copper's story is measured not in the frenzy of an hour but in the long accumulation of days. I know something of accumulation. In my counterstamping years I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and set them loose through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, where a caged bear grumbled and a man might have a tooth pulled and a dram poured in the same afternoon. Copper was the people's metal then, warm from a hundred palms. It is the people's metal still.

And where, I ask you, does that dram get its clean and honest character? From copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of them the red metal, and for good reason a stainless vessel can never match. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the fusel and the foulness, and drags them down so that what drips from the spout is bright and true. The monks knew it at their monastery stills; the Appalachian man in the laurel thickets knows it yet. Steady prices mean the distiller can plan his new still without fear, and that alone is cause enough to cheer a firm $6.20.

Nor is that copper's only labor this modern age. It runs as wire through the walls of every lit house, as pipe beneath every kitchen, as the green-weathered roof over the proud old bank. It coils in the motors of your electric carriages and hums, tirelessly, through the great data-houses where your machines do their thinking. Radiator or Bare Bright, #2 rough or bright brass — every honest scrapper's pile is a piece of that same vast circulatory system.

So hold your loads if you can, and sell them proud. The red metal endures, and asks only that we spend it wisely.

Yours in copper and clean spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins