Copper and Brass Climb While the Rest Stand Still

Well now, the ledger from IndexBox on this thirtieth of July, 1926 — beg pardon, 2026, my old bones lose the century — tells a tale I have heard a hundred thousand times, once for every cent I ever stamped with my own name across New England. Copper and brass gain. The others stand about like patrons who cannot decide what to drink. And the red metal? Up a modest half a percent on the day, with #1 Bare Bright fetching about $5.89 the pound. A handsome figure for the honest scrapper who brings me his bright, clean wire, stripped and gleaming like a fresh-minted coin.

Let me tell you why copper leads and the lesser metals loiter. Copper is the metal that does things. It does not merely sit — it conducts, it carries, it purifies. Consider the still. Every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, and backwoods moonshine that ever warmed an honest throat passed as vapor through copper — the pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm cooling in a barrel of creek water. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian man knows it behind his woodpile. Copper reaches into that rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bite that would otherwise ruin the spirit. A stainless vessel cannot perform this small miracle. It is dead metal. Copper is a living catalyst, and that, friends, is why brass — copper's alloyed cousin, kin to the still's fittings and the plumber's valves — rises alongside it today.

And the trades that lift the price go on multiplying. The same red metal that clears a moonshiner's run also strings the wires that electrify this modern age — the motors, the humming data-halls, the electric carriages gliding about without a horse to their name. It lines the pipes that bring water to your kitchen, weathers green upon a fine roof, and warms the bottom of every good copper pot. One metal, a thousand honest labors. Small wonder it gains while iron and its dull companions merely hold their ground.

So if you have copper to sell, this is no day to dawdle. Strip your wire to Bare Bright, sort your brass from your radiators, and carry it in while the market smiles. In my Fort Wilkins days I kept a caged bear and a tooth-pulling chair to draw a crowd, but it was always the copper cent, passing hand to hand across the bar, that told the truer story of a man's fortunes. It tells it still.

Sell honest, drink from a copper still, and keep the red metal moving.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins