What is a Rubik's Cube? The answer to that is simple. It is the world's greatest three-dimensional puzzle. Since it first appeared on toyshop shelves in the 1970s, the Cube has sold in the millions.
It faded from popularity in the 1980s, but now it is making a comeback. Give someone a Rubik's Cube and they become engrossed. You have to hold it, play with it, make it do things. It takes you over and becomes part of your body and your mind.
No single toy anywhere has ever had the impact that Rubik's Cube has had on the toy manufacturing industry. It was the toy industry's dream-come-true back in the 1970s, and thirty years later sales of the Cube are steadily rising again as new fans discover its magical power.
Rubik's Cube was invented in Hungary by Erno Rubik in 1974. Mr Rubik was a lecturer in the Department of Interior Design at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Budapest. He was passionately interested in the geometry of design and the study of three-dimensional shapes. He liked to know how things were constructed, why they looked the way they did and how they worked.
Mr Rubik built himself a small, plastic cube with six differently coloured sides. Each side was made up of nine small blocks. Inside the cube there was a complicated mechanism that allowed the fifty-four individual coloured blocks to be moved around so that all the colours could be mixed up. The challenge was to scramble up all the colours and then get each of the Cube's sides back into some sort of pattern. Erno Rubik's students and friends were fascinated when he showed them his Cube. Once one of them had got their hands on the Cube it was difficult to get it back.
Mr Rubik was completely surprised by everyone's compulsive fascination with his little toy, but gradually he began to look around for a commercial manufacturer to mass-produce the Cube so it could be sold to the public. At the end of 1977, the first commercially produced Cubes appeared in Budapest toyshops. They sold like hot cakes. News of this intriguing new toy travelled quickly and soon manufacturers all over the world were turning out Rubik's Cubes in their millions. Cube-mania spread all over the planet.
