Who has not seen the enticing, intriguing, (and if you do not know the trick to tackle it) very confusing Rubik’s cube. The Rubik’s cube was brought forth to us by Erno Rubik, a hero to most Hungarians, since he invented something that is still so commonly used all around us.
It is something that we all must have some memories with, you might have been blamed for breaking a Rubik’s cube at one time or another due to frustration at not being able to complete it or you might have a cherished memory when you were actually able to put the Rubik’s cube correctly.
The inventor, Erno Rubik was born in Budapest in the 1940’s. He started off by studying culture at graduate level and then strove and achieved at getting a degree in architecture in the mid 1960’s.
After he graduated, he started teaching in the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest, Hungary. He was the instructor for the interior designer course.
Rubik believed in challenges and was trying to create a challenge for himself that would eventually put his intellect to a great test. He was in the struggle to create a puzzle that would never leave touching all the other parts. The biggest challenge that he faced in creating such a puzzle for himself was that he did not know the mechanics involved that would allow the pieces in the manner that he desired them to. The answer to this haunting dilemma that he was suffering from eventually came from the Danube River and the rocks that surround the river. He eventually got to use spheres in the midst of the cube.
The first model that he made of his famous cube actually consisted of cylinders that had small sized cubed hitched to them. Erno Rubik was originally deciding to make a puzzle that had three columns. Maybe for the fun of it or for other reasons that are hard to fathom and know for sure he actually expanded the cube. But what a great idea that was!
All you had to do was rotate the cubes about the cylinders to put the cubes in to a haphazard condition. The cubes were easy to set in motion and thus easy to disturb. Now the hard part was yet to come. It was actually putting the cube into the position that it was set to before. The main challenge was to put the small cubes in their original position; that was to have the cubes positioned back to back, with the same colours aligned together on one face.
He revealed this invention to his students and they were amazed and appreciated the idea. The original Magic cube (as he called it) had 26 small cubes and as a result about 54 possible faces. This in total made it possible for the Rubik’s cube to have millions of possible combinations, of which only one would be right.
Not just the Hungarian market but the world market all of them greeted the Rubik’s cube with immense interest and thus the Rubik’s cube gained amazingly new height of success and he was able to earn millions like this.
Tags and Categories:
This article is filed under: