In fact, there are only a handful of toys that last more than a generation. However, the Rubik’s cube, which is now over 40 years old, continues to be sold and is part of one of the great survivors of the toy closet.
What makes its success remarkable is that it didn’t start out as a toy. The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect and sculptor, who wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry in his classes-
After designing the “magic cube” as he called it (and it weighed twice as much as the current model), he realized that he could not solve the puzzle. The more he moved the colored squares, the more confusing they became. “It was a code that I had invented myself!” Wrote Rubik. “However, I couldn’t read it.”
As you know, the Rubik’s Cube, made up of nine colored squares on each side, can be rearranged into 43 trillion different ways. That’s right: 43,000,000,000,000,000,000. There are many zeros and many possibilities.
After a month, and using a method to rearrange the corners on each side first, he finally solved the puzzle. Eureka!
Being from Hungary, and under the Iron Curtain, it took Rubik a few years to market the cube as a toy. It was showcased at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1979 (a toy fair that has released many great toys, like Playmobil in 1974), and was seen as a potential hit. Associated with Ideal Toy Corp in 1980, in January 2009, more than 350 million units were sold worldwide, making it the best-selling toy of all time.
Its heyday took place in the early 1980s, winning the UK Toy of the Year title in 1980 and 1981, despite the vast majority of children being unable to solve the cube and resorting to cheating by adding stickers to it. of colors to complete the challenge.
Later the Rubik’s Cube went from front page to a more secondary place, but it never completely disappeared, thanks in part to speed competitions in which you try to solve the cube as quickly as possible. Teenager Mats Valk, for example, managed to solve it in 5.55 seconds. In October 2017, young Korean SeungBeom Cho smashed the world record by doing it in just 4.5 seconds.
The robots, however, were able to solve it even faster (as expected). The Cubestormer III robot built with Lego kits and powered by a Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone solved it in 3.25 seconds a few years ago but in March 2018, a robot created by software developer Jared Di Carlo and MIT Biometrics Lab Master’s student. Ben Katz, was able to solve a 3X3 square Rubik’s Cube in just 0.38 seconds, in less than half a second.
