Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik created his cube to explain three-dimensional geometry to his students. It may be comforting to learn it took more than a month for Rubik to solve his own puzzle!
International sales were also initially a struggle as in communist Hungary exports were strictly controlled. It started a worldwide craze only after Tom Kremer, a Hungarian expat, saw one at the Nuremburg toy fair in 1979 and persuaded the Ideal Toy Company to handle its distribution.
An estimated one in seven people in the world have played with a Rubik’s Cube, and more than 400m have been sold since its invention in 1974. No one has to explain its purpose – twiddled out of joint, its six mangled faces speak intuitively to our desire for order. It is appealing but exasperating and can seem unsolvable, even though there are about 43 quintillion ways to complete it.
Tackling a Rubik's Cube is a badge of honour for nerds. Nowadays it’s also cool. Pop star Justin Bieber can solve one in under two minutes.
The cube’s coloured stickers, with their distinctive rounded edges, gave it a unique 1970s aesthetic. Over time it has become an objet d’art, an unexampled intersection of design and mathematics.
Today variations abound, including cubes with four, 16 and 25 squares per face. In 2015 alone, Rubik’s Limited sold 8 million units, across the brand.
Computer algorithms say that any scramble of the original 3x3x3 cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer, which has thus been dubbed “God’s number”. The world record for “speed cubing” is held by 14-year-old Lucas Etter at 4.9 seconds, or the time it will have taken most addled adult brains to read this sentence.
&uuid=(email))