1972 Lincoln Memorial Cent - SKH-1c-1972-16 Spiked Head

Description

Attributed on July 1, 2024, by the Cuds on Coins team — just two and a half months after SKH-1c-1972-15 — the sixteenth spiked head for the 1972 Philadelphia Lincoln Memorial cent arrived in rapid succession after the long dormancy of the catalog between 2020 and early 2024. No cross-references have been established. The proximity of the fifteenth and sixteenth attributions suggests a renewed burst of collector activity focused on 1972-P spiked heads during 2024, potentially driven by increased awareness of the collecting opportunity or by a collector systematically working through a large accumulation of 1972 Philadelphia cents. This pattern of clustered discoveries mirrors earlier productive periods in the catalog's history (such as the January 2017 cluster of varieties 05 through 07, and the March 2018 cluster of varieties 08 through 10), where focused searching yields multiple new varieties in short succession before the available material is exhausted and another quiet period ensues. SKH-1c-1972-16 documents a sixteenth unique obverse die from the 1972 Philadelphia production run that developed a portrait-apex fatigue crack — the die steel yielding to repeated mechanical stress at the deepest point of the cavity where compressive forces are most concentrated during each striking cycle.

Cross References

• Cross reference: none. 07/01/2024.

External References