Tight Scrap, Firm Discounts, and the Red Metal's Long Memory

Word arrives from the wider world — SMM tells us that in the first half of this year of 1926, or 2026 as the almanacs now insist, copper prices surged outside the great markets of China, while raw material ran thin and the discounts on scrap held stubbornly firm. Tight supply, my friends, is the oldest story in the metal trade. When the red metal is scarce, every honest scrapper feels his pockets grow a touch heavier — and rightly so.

Here at home the ledger reads about $5.50 the pound for good #1 Bare Bright, though the day itself sags a trifling six-tenths of one percent. Pay the daily dip no mind. A wiggle on the tape is weather; the tight supply SMM describes is climate. When the world cannot pry loose enough copper to feed its appetites, the man holding clean bright wire holds something better than paper.

And what an appetite this age has grown! Copper threads every electric carriage humming down the avenue, coils every motor, and fills those cathedral-sized data halls where the machines are said to think. It carries water through the plumber's clean lines and crowns the roof in green patina. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents, passing hand to hand through saloons and eating-houses — including my own Fort Wilkins, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. The people's metal it was then, and the world's metal it remains.

But you know my dearest devotion. Speak to me of tight copper supply and my thoughts turn, as ever, to the still. For every fine drop of whiskey, brandy, and honest moonshine owes its clean soul to the red metal. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — copper, and copper alone, reaches into the rising vapor and pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean away. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian man knew it beneath his laurel thicket. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet alchemy. It merely holds; copper heals.

So when the market pinches and discounts stay firm, remember that the distiller will pay for his copper no matter the price, because the alternative is liquor that bites and stinks. That steady, ancient demand is the floor beneath your scrap pile. The electricians want it, the plumbers want it, the machine-builders want it, and the men who make good liquor will never be talked out of it.

Sell your radiators and your #2 with a clear conscience, but if you've a length of Bare Bright, hold it a heartbeat longer this week. Scarcity is speaking, and she rarely whispers twice.

Yours in the red metal and the rising vapor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins