In 1977 Erno Rubik's most original of all puzzles was patented. Rubik's Cube was actually in the making a few years before 1977; it's official invention year was 1974 in Budapest Hungary. It was called by several different names, including the Cube, the Hungarian Cube, and the Magic Cube, until the Ideal Toy Corporation bought the rights in September 1979 and renamed it Rubik's Cube, after first considering calling it The Gordian Knot.
Rubik's Cube inventor Erno Rubik was born in 1944 in Budapest, Hungary. In 1967, he earned an architect degree from the University of Technical Education of Budapest, followed by a second degree in design in 1970. It was during his early years as a high school teacher that the idea of The Cube was conceived.
Initially Rubik studied variations of a 2x2x2 cube, but found the simplest and most workable model to be a 3x3x3 cube. The interior mechanism, which is basically cylindrical, took some time to design. To make the cubes easy to manipulate, the balance between tightness and looseness had to be perfect. The 54 outer surfaces of the individual pieces were given their colors, after several different decorative patterns using numbers and symbols were tried first. Despite the different combinations, none worked as well as the 6 colors that were eventually chosen. Once completed, Rubik demonstrated the puzzle to his students and friends, and the rest is history.
Rubik's Cube made its international debut in 1980 at toy fairs in London, Paris, Nuremberg, and New York City, and quickly became a 1980's icon.
The first world championship took place on June 5, 1982 in Budapest. Nineteen contestants took part in the event. The cubes were scrambled by computer, then brought to the site of the competition in sealed cases. The competitors had 15 seconds to examine their cube before starting to solve the puzzle. The winner with the best time was the United States' Minh Thai, with an official time of 22.95 seconds. Since then, several cubists have been known to solve the puzzle in fewer than 20 seconds. It's interesting to note that it took Erno Rubik a full month to solve the puzzle himself. Among some of the lesser-known 'Cube Facts' is that one of the youngest to solve the Cube was a 7-year-old boy, Lars-Erik Anderson of Norway. He could repeatedly solve the puzzle, but couldn't explain how. Also, the Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different possible configurations. If allowed one second for each turn, it would take 1,400 million million years to go through all of the possible configurations. By comparison, the universe is only 14 thousand million years old.
After the craze of the early 1980's, the interest in Rubik's Cube diminished. However, with the advent of the Internet, cubomania seems to be re-appearing at an increasing rate. Regardless of the future of Rubik's Cube, one thing is sure: since its launch on the market in 1977, more than 200 million cubes have been sold, not including the many imitations and 'knock offs.'