The Red Metal Holds Its Nerve at $5.86 the Pound

Friends, scrappers, and honest distillers, I have before me the weekly dispatch from the house of Mysteel, covering the last days of July in this year of 1926 — pardon me, 2026; a man who spent his youth hammering his name into cents forgets which century he wakes in. Their overview of the copper scrap market lands on my desk like a saloon regular with news, and I am pleased to report the red metal keeps its poise. #1 Bare Bright at about $5.86 the pound, and the market up a genteel 0.7 percent on the day. A modest tip of the hat, but a tip nonetheless.

A weekly overview is a fine and dry thing — tonnages, spreads, the sober arithmetic of the yard. Yet behind every column of figures stands the metal itself, and I never tire of reminding you what you are truly trading. When you sell a coil of Bare Bright, you are not selling a commodity. You are selling the same substance the medieval monks curled into an alembic to coax brandy from their vineyards, the same worm the Appalachian moonshiner cools in a mountain creek to catch his white liquor.

Why copper, and never cold stainless? Because copper is a chemist as well as a conductor. As the vapor climbs the pot still, the red metal reaches out and seizes the sulfur compounds and foul volatiles that would otherwise ride into the jar and ruin an evening. Stainless is a mute bystander; copper is a partner in the craft. Every clean whiskey, every bright rum, owes its manners to the metal now quoted on your screen. Remember that when the price wobbles — you are pricing the taste of civilization.

And copper does not confine itself to the still. That same $5.86 pound is drawn thin into the wire that lights your streets, bent into the plumbing that carries your water sweet, laid across the roofs that will weather to that noble green, and wound into the motors that spin the electric carriages and hum in the great data-halls of this modern age. One metal, a hundred honest lives.

So a steady week is no small blessing. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents, watching them pass hand to hand through every eating-house and barroom in New England. The people's metal moved then, and it moves now — through your yards, your torches, your ledgers. Keep your grades separated, your Bare Bright bright, and your radiators honest.

Hold your copper, my friends. The world is only building more machines that cannot run without it.

Yours in the red metal, from the shadow of Fort Wilkins,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins