The Red Metal Soars: Bare Bright at $6.24 and Climbing

Friends of the red metal, I read this morning that copper scrap prices continue to soar — such is the word from the recyclers across the water — and here at home the honest scale reads about $6.24 the pound for Number One Bare Bright, with the market up a modest eight-tenths of a point on the day. A small step, mind you, but a step upward, and I never quarrel with the ledger when it tilts in copper's favor.

Let me tell you why this pleases an old showman. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents — the people's metal, passing hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. A man learns to love a metal that circulates so freely. And copper circulates yet — only now it runs through the walls of your house as water line, through the wire that lights your street, through the humming motors and the great glowing data-halls of this electric age, and down the roads in these new electric carriages that will not budge an inch without their windings of red wire.

But my truest affection, as ever, is for copper and spirits. Consider that soaring price and then consider the still — the pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's worm coiled bright in its cooling tub. Why copper, when a man might build cheaper in cold stainless? Because copper works. As the vapor rises it grasps hold of the sulfur and the foul volatiles, catches them against its walls and lets them go, and what runs off the spout is clean, sweet, and fit to drink. This is no idle craft-talk; the monastery alchemists knew it with their alembics, the brandy-men of France knew it, and every Appalachian distiller with a granddaddy's copper worm knows it still. A stainless kettle cannot pull that trick. The whiskey in your glass owes its very smoothness to the red metal.

So when the euwid men cry that scrap is climbing, I hear more than a trader's bulletin. I hear the world remembering, all at once, how much it needs this one particular element — for the wire, the pipe, the roof gone green with years, the cookware bottom, and yes, for the good clean liquor that copper alone makes possible.

Sell if you must, my scrapping friends, and take the fine coin the market offers. But do not sell your little copper still. That is the one piece of red metal worth more full than melted.

Yours in the trade, and forever partial to the red metal, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins