RUBIK’S
CUBE HISTORY
In
1974, a young Professor of architecture in Budapest, Hungary named Erno Rubik
created an object that was not supposed to be possible. His solid cube twisted
and turned - and still it did not break or fall apart. With colorful stickers
on its sides, the Cube got scrambled and thus emerged the first “Rubik’s Cube”.
It took well over a month for Erno to work out the solution to his puzzle. As a
teacher, Erno was always looking for new, more exciting ways to present
information, so he used the Cube’s first model to help him explain to his
students about spatial relationships.
Erno has always thought of the Cube
primarily as an object of art, a mobile sculpture symbolizing stark contrasts
of the human condition: bewildering problems and triumphant intelligence;
simplicity and complexity; stability and dynamism; order and chaos. For this
magic object to become the most popular toy in history a few chance meetings
had to take
How was Erno’s invention, that had become a major success in Hungary, going to make it into the hands of every child of the 80’s? The first step in the Rubik’s Cube’s battle to worldwide recognition was to get out of Hungary. This was accomplished partly by the enchanted mathematicians who took the Cubes to international conferences and partly by an expat Hungarian entrepreneur who took the cube to the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1979. It was at there that Tom Kremer, a toy specialist, agreed to sell it to the rest of the world. Tom’s unrelenting belief in the Cube finally resulted in the Ideal Toy Company taking on distribution of the “Magic Cube”. Ideal Toy’s executives thought that the name had overtones of witchcraft and after going through several possibilities the name: “Rubik’s Cube” was decided on, and the icon was born. In the time since its international launch in 1980 an estimated 350 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold.
Approximately one in seven people alive have played with a Rubik’s Cube. This little six color cube has gone on to represent a decade. It has started art movements (Rubik Cubism); pop videos, Hollywood movies and even had its own TV show; it has come to represent both genius and confusion; it has birthed a sport (Speed cubing); and it has even been into space. The beauty of the Rubik’s Cube is that when you look at a scrambled one, you know exactly what you need to do without instruction. Yet without instruction it is almost impossible to solve, making it one of the most infuriating and engaging inventions ever conceived.
I solved the Rubik's Cube during the month of Ramadan in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia in 1981, only one year after it became available in the West. In my upcoming lectures in California and Missouri I will be using the cube to model the cosmos, quantum physics and spiritual evolution.
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