Rubik's Cube

The Rubik's Cube is a hand-sized plastic cube, 5.6 centimetres along each edge, divided into three rows of three on every face. Its six faces are white, yellow, red, orange, blue and green, set on a black body. Each layer of nine smaller cubes can be twisted a quarter turn at a time about a hidden core, so that the colours scatter across the faces. The puzzle is to twist them back until every face shows one colour again.

It began as a problem of construction rather than a game. Ernő Rubik, teaching interior design in Budapest in 1974, wanted a structure whose parts could move independently without falling apart, and he solved it by shaping the pieces so that they held one another in place around a central cross. Only after scrambling his model did he realise he had made a puzzle, and it took him about a month to solve it.

The first cubes were made in 1977 by Politechnika, a Budapest cooperative, and sold in Budapest toy shops as the bűvös kocka, the Magic Cube, under the patent Rubik had been granted that year. Two years later a businessman carried one to the Nuremberg toy fair, and in 1980 the Ideal Toy Company launched it to the world under its inventor's name, slightly lightened to meet Western safety rules. Within three years some 200 million had been sold, and three of the ten best-selling books in America were guides to solving it.

The craze passed, but the cube stayed in the shops. Speedcubing competitions returned in 2003 and are now run by the World Cube Association, and Spin Master, which bought the brand in 2021, still sells the original 3x3. Its mechanism has been redesigned and its finish made matte, but the object in the hand is the one that first appeared in Budapest in 1977.