Homophone date codes

Homophone and Invicta Date Codes

A Homophone dating article by Peter Copeland appeared in ‘The Historic Record’ – I have a photocopy, but the number of the magazine is not known. Thanks to the late Arthur Badrock for supplying the reference & photocopy. What follows is merely an informal ‘gossip’ on the topic – with particular reference to the early and short-lived period (1912 – 1914) during which Invicta records bore a confusing variant.   

Unfortunately for us, very few 78 records carry dates to indicate when they were recorded, plated or pressed. But the German Homophon Company was a notable exception. Indeed, between about 1905 and 1926, their discs actually carry two dates: as it were, a gift to future Discographers. It would be very nice if one of them was the actual recording date of the performance; but alas, there is an increasing consensus that this is not the case. If so, then what do the dates signify.

The other marking to the right of the label is G10V. Thanks to the pioneering work by Peter Hulpusch, we know that is a date in the form month-day-year. The number in the middle is clearly the day of the month, confirmed by the fact that no number larger that 31 is ever found. The first letter had to be the month, because only the twelve letters A to M (omitting ‘I’) are ever found in this position. (It has been assumed that A is January, B is February and so on). The final letter, inevitably, was the year. To cut a long story short, it is known that these letters run backwards, and seem to be based on Z representing 1901. Homophone disc records only date back to 1905, but it must be admitted that 1901 is a logical starting point.

Here is a table in accordance with Peter Hulpusch’s findings:

So G10V gives us 10th July 1905. The other date, 25th July 1907, is two years later.

Before trying to figure out what the dates might refer to, let us study a few more Homophones – or Homophons, or Homochords, Homokord, Homocord; the name evolved over the years – in order to look for general trends in these dates.

We’ll begin with the other side of the above record.

The letter codes appear below the label – M24R. Thanks to the generous help of many discographers, scores of Invicta letter codes have been studied  – far more than for Homophone – and without further discussion, here is a proposed table of the Invicta Code.

Only three year letters are involved in Invicta date codes: those in red above. M is the commonest, though N is plentiful too. O is extremely rare and there are only 5 sides known to us. Associated with the rare year O (1914), only two month letters have been seen: Z & Y, which equate to January & February 1914. This accords well with the facts, since the sales of German Invictas were minuscule in 1914 . Following a dispute with Barraud, a new agent, John Abrahams, had been appointed. He clearly wasn’t very good at selling them, for these later Invictas are almost never seen. And it goes without saying that there cannot be German Invictas with a month date after August (or more likely July) 1914, as the Great War broke out in early August.

We point out, merely as a piece of trivia, that the two systems would have coincided during December 1912. M15O would mean 15th of December 1912 whether it be a Homophone or an Invicta.

Thanks are due to: the late Arthur Badrock, Steven Walker, William Dean-Myatt M. Phil., Dr. Rainer Lotz, Mike Thomas, Robert Girling, Joe Moore, Matthew Duncan.

Page written 31st December 2008.
Revised 2011, 2013.
Moved to this site 19th June 2016.