Rubik's Cube Invention: 40 Years Old and Never Meant To Be a Toy
     There are only a handful of toys that last more than a generation. But the Rubik's cube, which celebrates its 40th birthday, 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 more 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, he realized he could not actually solve the puzzle. The more he moved the colored squares, the more mixed up they became. “It was a code I myself had invented!” he wrote. “Yet I could not read it.” After a month, and using a method of rearranging the corners of each side first, he finally solved the puzzle.
     The Rubik’s Cube was shown at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1979, 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 colored 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 5.55 seconds. Robots, however, have been able to solve the Rubik’s cube even more quickly. The Cubestormer III robot solved it in 3.25 seconds in March, 2014.