There are only a handful of toys that last more than a generation. But the Rubik's cube, which celebrates its 40th birthday (and features on
Google with a Doodle), now joins the likes of Barbie, Play-Doh, Lego and the Slinky, as one of the great survivors in the toy cupboard.
What makes its success all the remarkable is that it did not start out as a toy. The Rubik's cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect, who wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry.
After designing the “magic cube” as he called it (twice the weight of the current toy), he realised he could not actually solve the puzzle. The more he moved the coloured squares, the more mixed up they became. “It was a code I myself had invented!” he wrote. “Yet I could not read it.”
The cube, made up of nine coloured squares on each side, can be rearranged in 43 quintillion different ways. That is 43,000,000,000,000,000,000.
After a month, and using a method of rearranging the corners of each side first, he finally solved the puzzle.
Being from Hungary, then behind the Iron Curtain, it meant that Rubik took a few years to market the cube as a toy. It was shown at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1979 (a toy fair which has seen many great toys be launched, such as Playmobil in 1974), and was spotted as a potential hit. It was licensed to the Ideal Toy Corp in 1980 and, by January 2009, more than 350 million units had been sold worldwide, making it the biggest-selling toy of all time.
Its heyday was in the early 1980s – it won Toy of the Year in the UK in both 1980 and 1981 – even though the great majority of children could not solve the cube and resorted to cheating by peeling off the coloured stickers.
It then fell from fashion, but never completely disappeared, thanks in part to “speed cubing” competitions, where people tried to solve the cube as quickly as possible. The current world record is held by Mats Valk, a Dutch teenager, who managed to solve it in 4.74 seconds.
Robots, however, been able to solve the Rubik’s cube even more quickly. The Cubestormer III robot built from Lego kits and powered by a Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone solved it in 3.25 seconds in March 2014.
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, was once asked whether he had a hidden talent. He answered: "I can do a Rubik's cube in one minute and 30 seconds."
