The Red Tide Rises: Bare Bright at $5.35 and Climbing

Word reaches my workshop from across the water — the gentlemen of EUWID report that scrap prices have risen again on the heels of the London Metal Exchange. And here on our own shores the honest yardman's measure, #1 Bare Bright, stands near $5.35 the pound, with the market up a respectable nine-tenths of a percent on the day. The red metal climbs, as red metal is wont to do when the world remembers what it is good for.

I have spent a lifetime in copper's company. In my counterstamping days I drove "DR. G. G. WILKINS" into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my name passing hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then. It is the people's metal still, only now the people pay rather better for it.

And let me tell you why this rise gladdens me beyond the mere figures. Of all copper's noble offices, none is dearer to my heart than the still. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — every one of them wrought of copper, and for good and ancient reason. Stainless steel may shine, but it stands mute and idle while the vapor passes; copper does work. It seizes the sulfur compounds, scrubs away the foul volatiles, and hands you back a spirit clean and sweet upon the tongue. From the cloistered monks at their brandy to the Appalachian man at his branch water, the secret has never changed: good liquor is a gift of the red metal. Raise the price of copper and you raise, in some small way, the price of every honest dram.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same metal that perfumes your whiskey also threads through the walls as electrical wire, runs cool and true as your water lines, lines the bottom of the cook's good pan, weathers green upon the roof, and turns within every electric motor. In this modern age it feeds the humming data halls and the electric carriages besides. Small wonder the world bids it up — there is simply not enough copper to electrify everything we dream of and distill everything we thirst for.

So to the scrapper sorting his Bare Bright from his #2, his bright wire from his radiators and his brass — you hold a rising commodity in your blackened hands. Hold it proudly. You are custodian of the conductor, the purifier, the people's metal.

Sell wisely, drink well, and keep your worm bright.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins