Bare Bright Holds at $6.24 as the Red Metal Keeps Its Nerve

Step close and let me tell you what the wires bring from the East. Mysteel, those diligent scribes of the Orient, have set down their weekly overview of the copper scrap market for the first week of September, and I have read it as a man reads the pulse at another man's wrist. The verdict? Steady. Our red metal has moved up a modest 0.4 percent on the day, and honest #1 Bare Bright commands about $6.24 the pound across these United States. No wild stampede, no collapse — only the quiet confidence of a metal that has never once needed to shout.

I have handled a great deal of copper in my time. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand cents, and I watched those coins pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was ever the people's metal, and a weekly overview that shows it neither swooning nor bolting tells me the people's metal is well.

But you know where my heart truly runs. To the still. Reflect, friends, that every clean dram of whiskey, every honest brandy and every jug of mountain moonshine owes its virtue to copper and copper alone. When the vapor rises through the pot still — the alembic the monks kept in their cold stone cellars, the worm the Appalachian man coils behind his cabin — it is the copper that seizes the sulfur and drags out the foul volatiles that would otherwise turn your liquor to poison. A stainless kettle cannot do this work. It stands there dumb as a fencepost. Copper alone reaches into the breath of the spirit and makes it fit to drink. Centuries of distillers knew it, and a steady $6.24 keeps the coppersmith's forge lit for the next generation of them.

Nor does the red metal rest there. It runs as wire through the walls of every house, it carries the water in your plumbing, it lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, it greens the roofs of proud cities, and now it feeds the humming motors and the great data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless modern age. Whether spun into #1 and #2, stripped from insulated wire, or gathered as brass and radiators, every grade in the scrapper's yard is a link in that same long chain.

So take heart from the East's quiet report. A firm market and a bright pound of copper mean the distiller's coil, the electrician's spool, and the scrapper's honest scale all keep faith together. Hold your bright metal a day longer if the spirit moves you.

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