Bare Bright at $6.45: The Red Metal Holds Its Court

Come close, friends, and mark the ticker. The good clerks over at SMM Metal have posted their daily reckoning of scrap copper, and the wider market whispers the same tune I have hummed my whole life long: the red metal is dear. Today the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.45 the pound across these United States. A tidy sum for a length of bright wire stripped clean of its jacket — and a fitting tribute to the finest metal God ever hid in stone.

Now, I have handled copper in more forms than most men have handled bank-notes. In my counterstamping years I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched every one of them travel — into the saloon, the eating-house, my own Fort Wilkins where the caged bear grumbled and the tooth-pulling chair did brisk trade. Copper was the people's metal then, passed palm to palm. At six dollars and change the pound, it is the people's metal still, only now it commands a king's respect.

But you know where my heart truly lodges. It is in the still. Every drop of clean whiskey, brandy, rum, or backwoods moonshine you have ever thanked God for was born in copper's embrace. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm sweating in the creek — these are copper because copper listens. As the vapor rises, the red metal seizes hold of the sulfurous devils and the rank volatiles and drags them from the spirit, leaving it sweet. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet alchemy; it merely holds the liquor without befriending it. From the monastery alembics of old, through the Appalachian hollows, to the craft distiller polishing his gleaming column today — the lineage runs unbroken through copper. Every serious distiller knows it, and pays for it gladly.

And that is the secret behind a price like this. Copper is asked to be everywhere at once. It is the nerve of the electric wire, humming through the walls and out to the whining data-halls and the silent electric carriages. It is the plumber's water line and the cook's pan bottom, the green-weathered roof and the singing motor. It is bronze and brass and the coin of common men. Small wonder the scrap-yard scale reads heavy.

So if you've a barrel of bright wire, a heap of radiators, or a retired still gone soft, know its worth and sell it standing tall. And if you keep a copper still working — cherish it. It is doing the same holy labor it has done for six hundred years, and no cheaper metal will take up the burden.

Keep your copper bright, your worm cool, and your dram clean.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins