Rubik's Cube: A plastic cube turns 50

11.09.2024

U' L' U L U F U' F' – doesn't mean anything to you? And yet you have most probably already followed this pattern: when trying to solve the Rubik's Cube. The plastic cube is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Originally made of wood, it is now of course made of plastic (some of it even recycled) and is as popular as it was on its first day.

From today's perspective, it is hard to imagine that it took six years to develop the small cube. But where rapid prototyping, fused deposition modeling and the like make development easier for us today, in the past there was nothing like that. The cube had to be designed and built by hand. In 1974, Hungarian Ernő Rubik developed the Rubik's Cube, which has been world-famous since the 1980s and bears his name. Rubik built the first models out of wood.

When the cube went into mass production, the manufacturers switched to acrylonitrile butadiene styrene copolymer (ABS) and injection molding. After the black individual parts were produced and assembled, they were covered with the typical colorful stickers made of polypropylene film. The design is as simple as it is practical. The cube has never really gone out of fashion since the 1980s.

The cube was developed at a politically difficult time. While it became a bestseller in its native Hungary through word of mouth alone, sales on the other side of the Iron Curtain were difficult. According to the inventor Rubik (who, incidentally, was a professor of architecture), it was simply too complex in the eyes of Western companies. A toy that only a fraction of buyers would ever solve? Not interesting.

Plastic often makes history and becomes a real classic. The Bobby Car has also already celebrated its 50th birthday. Click here for the article.

The German toy manufacturer Schleich is also moving with the times and is pursuing an ambitious sustainability project. Get to know more about that here.

Infographic: The Rubik's Cube has been sold 500 million times; Copyright: beta-web GmbH/Molinari

One company finally took the risk and estimated the sales figures (then optimistically) at one million. They just missed the mark: the plastic cube was sold 30 million times worldwide in its first year. To date, the Rubik's Cube has been sold almost 500 million times - approximately 52 times the current population of Hungary.

Today, the Rubik's Cube brand belongs to Spin Master and is moving with the times when it comes to plastic. In addition to the many cube variants made of conventional plastic, Spin Master has developed the Rubik's Re-Cube made of 100 percent recycled plastic, thus taking a major step towards sustainability in the plastics industry. It is made from 100 percent recycled plastic. But that's not all when it comes to sustainability: in 2021, Spin Master Corp. in the USA teamed up with the company TerraCycle to make the cubes more recyclable. If the cube is no longer wanted, it can be sent to TerraCycle. There it is melted down and then processed into park benches, for example.

And what is the cryptic combination "U' L' U L U F U' F'" all about? Quite simple: 'Cubes' use such letter combinations to note down the respective movements. The letters stand for the side of the cube to be moved (U for Up, L for Left, F for Front, etc.). An apostrophe is added when the side is turned counter-clockwise. Mathematicians racked their brains for decades over the shortest solution for the Rubik's cube, the so-called God number.

Got a taste for it? So that users don't despair after the first turn, there are numerous instructions on how to solve the cube. The official Rubik's Cube website also provides a guide.

Click here for the guide.

The God number describes the ideal solution to a mathematical problem. In the case of the Rubik's Cube, this means solving the cube with as few turns as possible. The difficulty for the mathematicians lay in the number of possible combinations. There are 18 possibilities for the first move with the cube, then 18 more for the next move, and so on. This results in 43 trillion different positions. In 2010, German mathematician Herbert Kociemba and Californian computer scientist Thomas Rokicki proved that the number of God is 20.

Apart from the recycled plastic, the Rubik's Cube is also moving with the times in terms of digitalization. It is also available with Bluetooth so that an app can track every movement. But whether old-school or modern: The Rubik's Cube has been delighting people for decades. Incidentally, it took its inventor over a month to solve it the first time. So don't worry if you also aren't successful in your first few spins.

The Rubik's Cube in numbers

Records: Max Park solves the cube in 3.13 seconds in 2023. A robot from Mitsubishi Electric Corporation takes just 0.305 seconds
Size: The most complicated Rubik's Cube is 21x21 squares.
Solution: There are 43 trillion ways to solve the Rubik's Cube. You could cover the earth 200 times with this number of Rubik's Cubes.
Documentary: In 2020, Netflix released the documentary "The Speed Cubers". Max Park is also one of the protagonists here.
Pop culture: The Rubik's Cube also appears in films time and again, for example in 2012 in "The Amazing Spiderman" with Andrew Garfield, in 1998 in "Armageddon" or in the animated children's film "Wall-E".