Bare Bright Holds at $6.47 — Shanghai Marks the Red Metal

Word arrives this morning from the far side of the world — the Shanghai Metals Market posting the price of scrap copper per pound, as if the merchants of the Orient and the scrappers of New England were leaning over the same counter. And so they are, for copper is a language spoken in every tongue. The market ticks up a modest one-tenth of one percent, and #1 Bare Bright rests at about $6.47 the pound — a steady, honest figure, the sort a man can shake hands on.

I have handled copper in more forms than most men living. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched them travel — saloon to saloon, palm to palm, into the till of my own Fort Wilkins where the bear paced his cage and the tooth-pulling chair waited for the brave. Copper was the people's metal then, and it is the people's metal yet.

But let me speak of what stirs my old heart most: copper and the making of spirits. There is a reason the distiller has clung to the red metal through every century — from the hooded monks bent over their alembics to the Appalachian moonshiner nursing his worm through the still hours of night. Copper does a thing no cold-hearted stainless vessel can manage: as the vapor rises, the copper seizes hold of the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles, plucks them from the breath of the wash, and lets only the clean spirit pass. A pot still of good copper is not mere plumbing — it is a purifier, a chemist that works while you sleep. Whiskey, brandy, rum, the honest white lightning of the hills — all of them owe their sweetness to this quiet alchemy. Pour a stainless dram beside a copper-kissed one and your own tongue will render the verdict.

And copper's labors do not end at the still-house door. That same red metal threads the wire that lights your parlor and hums in every electric motor. It carries clean water through the walls of your house, weathers to noble green upon the roof, warms the bottom of the cook's good pan, and — in this galloping modern age — feeds the vast data-halls and the electric carriages that men now build by the thousand. Every one of them thirsts for copper.

So when Shanghai marks the price and our own yards hold near $6.47, understand what is truly being weighed: not scrap, but the metal that conducts the light and cleans the liquor and has passed through more hands than any coin I ever stamped. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, keep your brass and radiators honest, and remember the red metal knows no borders.

Yours in the noble red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins