Rubik and the Cube

The Rubik's Cube is the best-selling puzzle in the world, with sales often put in the hundreds of millions (check the figure). It began as a teaching aid made by an architecture teacher in Budapest. This chapter covers who Ernő Rubik was, how the Magic Cube came about, how its mechanism works in plain terms, and how a product made behind the Iron Curtain became a worldwide craze. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged for checking.

Ernő Rubik

Ernő Rubik was born in Budapest in 1944 (check) into a family with an engineering background; his father designed gliders and his mother was a poet (check). He studied sculpture and then architecture, and in the early 1970s taught at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest, teaching interior and design subjects (check the institution and the subject). His interest was in three-dimensional form and in how to teach students to think about it, which is the root of the invention. See Hungarian Architecture for the architectural setting of Budapest in these years.

The Magic Cube

In 1974 Rubik built a prototype of a cube made of smaller blocks that could rotate in groups while the whole structure stayed together (check the year). The first model was made of wood and held together with rubber bands (check). It was meant as a way to show students how an object could be moved in space, and Rubik is said to have realised it was also a puzzle only after he scrambled it and found he could not put it right (check the story).

• The patent. Rubik applied for a Hungarian patent in 1975, and it was granted in 1977 (check the dates and the exact title; he was not the only person to have had a similar idea, see below).
• The name. In Hungary the object was called the Magic Cube (Bűvös kocka). The name Rubik's Cube was adopted for the international launch (check).
• Production. The first batches were made in Hungary in the late 1970s by a small state-owned toy and plastics company (check the firm) and sold through shops.

The Mechanism in Plain Terms

The cube looks like 27 small cubes (three by three by three) but is not built that way. Inside is a core, usually a cross-shaped piece, and the outer pieces are shaped to lock into one another and into the core so that each face can turn (check the construction).

Turning a face moves its edge and corner pieces while the centres stay in place. The cleverness is that the pieces are held together by their shapes and not by glue or screws, so the whole thing can be turned thousands of times (check the lifetime of early cubes). Chapter 3 looks at how the colours are put back in order and the mathematics of the cube.

The Craze

The cube reached the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rubik's contacts at a Hungarian trade organisation and an international toy dealer helped it appear at toy fairs in Nuremberg and elsewhere (check the people and the route). The American toy company Ideal Toy took up the licence and launched it widely in 1980 (check the date and the licence arrangements).

• Sales. Tens of millions of cubes sold in a few years, and the toy became a symbol of the early 1980s (check the figures).
• Culture. Books of solutions, competitions, television coverage and a place in popular memory (check the examples).
• Decline and return. Interest fell in the mid-1980s, then returned with the internet and speedcubing in the 2000s (see Chapter 3).

A Hungarian Product in the Cold War

That a puzzle made in a socialist country became a Western bestseller was unusual (check how unusual). The details of royalties, licensing and how much Rubik himself earned are less clear, and accounts differ (check). He became one of Hungary's best-known people abroad, and has kept a role as a designer, teacher and advocate of puzzle-based education (check his later projects, and see Chapter 9 for the political side).

Exercises