Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik wanted to create a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry to his students, but he ended up inventing the world’s best-selling toy instead.

The Rubik’s Cube became a worldwide phenomenon in 1980. Today, more than 300 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold worldwide – so many, in fact, that if all the cubes were placed on top of each other it would be enough to reach the North Pole from the South Pole!

The Rubik’s Cube has featured in hundreds of books, magazines and movies and even had its own TV series in America called Rubik the Amazing Cube. Millions of web pages, blogs and YouTube videos are dedicated to cubing, and it has even inspired fashion, architecture, music, plays and political speeches.

It has earned a place in a permanent exhibit in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and entered the Oxford English Dictionary just two years after its invention. And in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the United States, the largest Rubik’s Cube stands on displays at three metres tall and weighing in at more than 500 kilograms!
At the height of the Rubik’s craze in the mid-1980s, it was estimated that one-fifth of the world’s population had played the cube. Today cubing still infects people of all ages, and there are even cubaholics who claim to suffer from “Rubik’s wrist” and “Cubist’s thumb”.

National and international speed-cubing championships are held regularly. The World Cube Association has thrown in some rather interesting challenges over the years too, where players have to solve the cube one-handed or using only their feet. There’s even a competition where players have to solve the cube as quickly as possible blindfolded. Sixteen-year-old Feliks Zemdegs of Melbourne is the current world-record holder for a single solve in an incredible time of 6.65 seconds.

The Rubik’s Cube turned 30 last year. We trust that inventor Ernő Rubik is happily retired with his feet up after leaving the world agonising in its quest to align those little coloured squares!