Field notes · Nº 20 2 min read Building things that last

The first person ever puzzled by the Rubik's Cube was Ernő Rubik.

By Pallav Sharma · Co-founder & CTO
On cream paper, a long ground line marked with thirty-one day ticks runs across the page. Above it a gold dashed path loops back on itself again and again before it settles, at the last day, on one gold point with a halo. Below the line, at the far left, a tiny grey sliver narrower than a single day. Labels: 'Today · under four seconds' and '1974 · a month'. Headline: 'A great design knows more than its maker.' Pallav Sharma, www.pallavsharma.com.

In 1974 he scrambled his new invention and needed a month to find the way back.

Today the world record is under four seconds.

The record I care about is the month.

A great design knows more than its maker.

What have you made that taught you more than you put into it?

Going deeper

In 1974 Ernő Rubik was a sculptor and professor of architecture in Budapest, and the problem in his hands was structural: how could a block made of smaller cubes turn in every direction without the whole thing falling apart? The first answer was held together with paper clips and rubber bands.

Then he turned it, and turned it again, and the colours scattered. He had built every part of the mechanism, yet nobody had ever found the way back through it, including him. It took him about a month.

That month is my favourite part of the story, because it is the moment a design became larger than the intentions behind it. Rubik knew every piece, every axis and every turn. What no one knew yet was the space all those turns could reach: about 43 quintillion arrangements, folded inside an object small enough to hold in one hand.

The rest of the story is the world exploring that space. The first batches of the Magic Cube were made in Hungary in late 1977. In 1980 it took its inventor’s name. In 2010 a team of mathematicians and programmers, using computer time donated by Google, showed that every scrambled position can be solved in twenty moves or fewer. Today the fastest solvers bring it home in under four seconds, and around half a billion cubes have been sold.

None of this takes anything from the man who made it. It is the highest compliment a maker can receive. A design that holds only what its author put in is complete on its first day. A great one keeps answering questions its author never thought to ask, for decades, in the hands of strangers.

Rubik was the cube’s first student. It has never run short of students since.

Sources

Quartz: It took the inventor of the Rubik’s Cube a month to solve his own puzzle · Mental Floss: How Ernő Rubik created the Rubik’s Cube · Wikipedia: Rubik’s Cube · cube20.org: God’s Number is 20 · The Register: Google helps solve the Rubik’s Cube · Ruwix: the 3.05-second single record