Tight Supply, Fat Prices: The Red Metal Plays Coy

Well now — the tale from the wires this July of 1926, or is it 2026? The calendar spins so fast in this electric age I scarce keep track. The headline reads that the copper scrap market struggles with tight supply and high prices, and I confess I felt a showman's thrill run down my spine, for scarcity is the mother of respect. When a metal grows dear, men remember at last what it is worth.

The numbers before me: #1 Bare Bright at about $6.06 the pound on the national average, and the market slipped 1.9 percent on the day. A stumble, not a fall — the red metal merely catching its breath before the next climb. Six dollars for bright, clean wire stripped of its skin! In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents, and each one traded for a penny in a saloon. Now a pound of the same red stuff fetches a small fortune. The people's metal has become a king's ransom, and the scrapper who hoards his bright wire sleeps easy tonight.

Why the pinch? Because copper is wanted everywhere at once. It is drawn into the wire that lights your parlor and hums in the motors of these electric carriages. It is coiled by the mile inside the great data-houses that think for the modern world. It lines your water pipes and greens the roofs and gutters of every proud building. There is not enough of the red metal to feed so many hungry mouths — hence the squeeze the wires report.

But you know my heart, and my heart is in the still. Before copper ever conducted a spark, it purified a spirit. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the moonshiner's worm coiled in a mountain creek, the pot still has always been copper — and for good reason. Copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and holds them fast, so that what drips from the worm runs clean and sweet. A stainless vessel cannot do it; it is dead to the chemistry. Every honest whiskey, brandy, and rum you have ever savored owes its softness to the red metal's quiet labor. So when supply tightens, spare a thought for the distiller, who cannot swap his copper alembic for cheaper stuff without ruining the dram.

My counsel: if your scrap pile holds bright wire, brass fittings, or the battered belly of an old still, you sit upon treasure in a tight market. Sell shrewd, and let the moneyed men fret over their percentages. The red metal endures — it made your liquor, it lights your night, and it will outlast every ledger.

Yours in the everlasting glow of the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins