This name still echoes in ears with music and reminds of a glistening cube, sweetly smooth, and pleasantly crunchy on corners with a delightful scent of the true foreign land. “We turn the Cube and it twists us,” Ernő Rubik, the creator of the magic cube, said.

The resourceful Hungarian never dreamt of a puzzle of the century. The professor of the Faculty of Interior Architecture and Design, Budapest Academy of Applied Arts and Design, just wanted to develop the spatial thinking in students. But it was the 1970s and computers had not reached the classrooms yet and everyone had to be content with expedient means – build 3D models from paper, cardboard, wood. After years of experiments, Rubik made a wooden cube consisting of 20 smaller blocks with colorful tiles. The next series of tests ended up with the central block removed and replaced with a rotation mechanism. It also took him some time to improve mechanisms and a solving method and figure out that images and numbers on tiles were no good and pick colors. The result was worth patenting and thinking of its commercial use.

The toy makers got to work and 300,000,000 bright cubes launched an attack on brains and hands. The cube pandemic seized the entire planet. Ernő Rubik was placed on the list of the world’s most prestigious Dutch Society of Puzzle Authors under the number zero. He became famous and rich and invented many more puzzles. Less popular and successful though.