SKH-1c-1972-07 Spiked Head

Description

Also attributed on January 26, 2017 — the same date as SKH-1c-1972-06 — the seventh spiked head for the 1972 Philadelphia Lincoln Memorial cent was documented by the Cuds on Coins team in what appears to have been a productive attribution session processing multiple submissions simultaneously. No cross-references have been established. The co-dating of varieties 06 and 07 strongly suggests these specimens were submitted together, likely by the same collector who had identified both while searching through a quantity of 1972 Philadelphia cents. Processing multiple candidates in a single session allows the attribution team to directly compare specimens against each other, confirming they represent different dies rather than different die states or strike conditions of the same die. With seven documented varieties by late January 2017, the 1972 Philadelphia spiked head catalog was approaching the depth necessary to characterize the overall failure pattern for this date: dies from across the production year developing portrait-apex cracks at varying points in their service life, each producing a spike of distinctive geometry. SKH-1c-1972-07 adds another data point to this failure distribution, documenting one more obverse die whose crystal structure yielded to repeated impact stress at the predictable location where the die cavity reaches its greatest depth and the metal above the portrait's highest point is thinnest — the universal precondition for spiked head formation across all Lincoln cent dates.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Earl M
• Cross reference: none. 01/26/2017.
• Expert attribution by Cuds on Coins

External References