The Rubik's Cube is a 3D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the Magic Cube, the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Pentangle Puzzles in the UK in 1978, and then by Ideal Toy Corp in 1980 via businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer. The cube was released internationally in 1980 and became one of the most recognised icons in popular culture. It won the 1980 German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle. As of January 2024, around 500 million cubes had been sold worldwide, making it the world's bestselling puzzle game and bestselling toy. The Rubik's Cube was inducted into the US National Toy Hall of Fame in 2014. On the original, classic Rubik's Cube, each of the six faces was covered by nine stickers, with each face in one of six solid colours: white, red, blue, orange, green and yellow. Some later versions of the cube have been updated to use coloured plastic panels instead. Since 1988, the arrangement of colours has been standardised, with white opposite yellow, blue opposite green and orange opposite red, and with the red, white and blue arranged clockwise, in that order. On early cubes, the position of the colours varied from cube to cube.
An internal pivot mechanism enables each layer to turn independently, thus mixing up the colours. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be returned to having only one colour. The cube has inspired other designers to create a number of similar puzzles with various numbers of sides, dimensions and mechanisms. Although the Rubik's Cube reached the height of its mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it is still widely known and used. Many speedcubers continue to practise it and similar puzzles, competing for the fastest times in various categories. Since 2003, the World Cube Association (WCA), the international governing body of the Rubik's Cube, has organised competitions worldwide and has recognised world records.
History
Precursors
In March 1970, Larry D. Nichols invented a 2x2x2 "Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups" and filed a Canadian patent application for it. Nichols's cube was held together by magnets. Nichols was granted U.S. patent 3,655,201 on 11 April 1972, two years before Rubik invented his Cube. On 9 April 1970, Frank Fox applied to patent an "amusement device", a type of sliding puzzle on a spherical surface with "at least two 3×3 arrays" intended to be used for the game of noughts and crosses. He received his UK patent (1344259) on 16 January 1974.
Rubik's invention In the mid-1970s, Ernő Rubik worked at the Department of Interior Design at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest, where he taught courses on design and architecture and experimented with three-dimensional structures and models. Although it is widely reported that the Cube was initially built as a teaching tool to help his students understand 3D objects and spatial relationships, his actual purpose was solving the structural problem of allowing many small parts to move independently while still remaining part of a single, coherent mechanical system. In other words, Rubik was primarily interested in engineering a stable, twistable structure in which each layer could rotate freely without the entire mechanism falling apart. He did not immediately realise that he had created a puzzle: this only became apparent after he scrambled his newly constructed Cube for the first time and then attempted to restore it to its original ordered state. According to later recollections, it took him about a month of trial and error to solve his own creation, during which time he became aware of the Cube's combinatorial complexity and potential as a recreational object. Rubik applied for a patent in Hungary for his "Magic Cube" (Hungarian: bűvös kocka) on 30 January 1975. The patent HU170062, granted later that year, covered the core mechanical idea of a three-dimensional combination puzzle based on interlocking elements rotating around a central axis. This protection allowed Rubik and his collaborators to explore ways of manufacturing the object on a larger scale within the Hungarian toy industry. Decades later, Rubik described his early experiments, the intellectual background of the invention, and his reflections on the Cube’s cultural impact in his book Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All. The first test batches of the Magic Cube were produced in late 1977 and released in toy shops in Budapest, where they attracted local attention among students, hobbyists, and puzzle enthusiasts. The Magic Cube was held together with interlocking plastic pieces that prevented the puzzle from being easily pulled apart, in contrast to the earlier design by Larry Nichols, whose cube used small internal magnets and was less robust under repeated twisting. Rubik’s design emphasised durability and smooth rotation, making it better suited to mass play and repeated handling.
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