Cold Open

It’s 6 AM, on May 19th, 1974, in a small apartment in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

Springtime sunshine streams through the kitchen window as 60-year-old Magdolna Szántó fills her green enamel kettle and lights the gas, to the usual soundtrack of her home.

Sanding, sawing, drilling, and the occasional huff of frustration have underscored Magdolna’s life for the past six weeks. And this Sunday morning is no exception. Magdolna shares her apartment with her 29-year-old son. A lecturer in architecture by profession, he's recently devoted his every spare moment to a project that has become an obsession.

So, Magdolna pours her son’s tea into a cup and squeezes it onto a tray stacked with smoked meats, bread, and scrambled eggs. Then, she carries the tray down the hall to her son’s room.

The bedroom is in its usual state—rubber bands, paperclips, springs, cardboard, wood, and tools fill every space. And in the middle, covered in sawdust, is her son. He seems pleased with himself, though. Setting down the tray, Magdolna notices a wooden block on the desk, itself made up of multiple colored cubes. This must be what all the fuss has been about.

She reaches out to pick it up, but he stops her. He says it's not quite ready yet, still needs a few finishing touches.

Magdolna smiles. There’s no point in arguing with the perfectionist she's raised. But she knows him too well—this morning, he has achieved something important.

Magdolna Szántó’s son is called Ernő Rubik, and even he isn’t entirely sure what he’s created. His aim was to produce a teaching tool to help his students grasp three-dimensional movement, and this working prototype may well achieve that goal. But this small, multicolored, wooden block will also take Ernő’s life and career in a totally unexpected direction, after its creation on May 19th, 1974.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is May 19th, 1974: The Invention of the Rubik’s Cube. 

Act One: A Chip Off the Old Blocks

It’s May 6th, 1960, at an Airport in Hungary, fourteen years before the invention of the Rubik’s Cube.

Near the runway, 15-year-old Ernő Rubik grips the rail of the viewing platform, his stomach in knots. This is a big day for the Rubik family. Ernő’s father is a highly respected aeronautical engineer, and today, he’s overseeing the maiden flight of a new glider he’s designed. This prototype features an experimental V-tail and lightweight, corrugated metal skin. Ernő has watched his father work on the glider from the very beginning, and he's closely observed how his father solves puzzles and overcomes setbacks.

Gazing skyward and shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, Ernő watches the glider swoop effortlessly through the clouds. He hears a giddy murmur from the assembled onlookers, who are just as impressed and exhilarated by the sleek new craft as he is.

Ernő’s father is not a warm man, and the relationship between them is a distant one. Still, Ernő is deeply proud of his dad’s achievement, and he hopes he can find similar success one day.

But he doesn’t want to build airplanes. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, when Ernő finishes school, he enrolls to study architecture at college. He enjoys his time there, but while he’s studying, Ernő’s home life grows strained. His parents’ marriage collapses, and after the breakup, Ernő moves in with his mother. Though he’s inherited an engineer’s mind from his father, Ernő also connects deeply with his mother’s more artistic and intuitive worldview. She is a poet and pianist by profession, and despite losing nearly all her family during World War II, she remains one of life’s optimists. So from the wreckage of her marriage, she builds a new haven for her and Ernő in their small shared apartment in Budapest.

By 1971, Ernő has graduated and been appointed as a lecturer at the Budapest College of Applied Arts. He enjoys the job and takes great pleasure in delving into the complexities of three-dimensional design with his classes. But he runs into one difficulty again and again—how to convey 3D concepts to his students with words and diagrams alone. What he needs is a tool, a physical device that will help the students grapple with these complicated ideas in a more tactile way.

Drawing on his father’s technical mindset and his mother’s more artistic, playful spirit, Ernő starts working on a new teaching aid. His idea is to construct a segmented cube, where the individual pieces can move separately, but the whole stays as one.

Using his bedroom as a workshop, Ernő quickly puts together his first prototype. It's just a proof of concept, held together with little more than rubber bands and paperclips. But he learns something important from the flimsy box. His first idea was to create a two-by-two cube, but he quickly sees that is too simplistic. Three-by-three is required instead. That will create more possible combinations, while still fitting comfortably in the hand. And it will also provide a fixed center piece that can hold the other blocks together. So after weeks more work, and having added primary-colored stickers to the faces of the cube, Ernő completes his second prototype on May 19th, 1974.

Sitting in his chaotic bedroom, surrounded by tools and sawdust, Ernő puts his cube to the test. He rotates the sides excitedly, back and forth, around and around. The mechanism is a small triumph—it moves with fluid precision, exactly as he had imagined. But then his enthusiasm stalls. He stares at the mangled mess of colors he’s made, and realizes he has no idea how to undo what he's just done. The neat, orderly block he started with is gone, and in its place is chaos. He tries a turn to the left, and then a turn to the right—but the colors only seem to drift farther away from where they started. He's stuck and doesn’t know how to go back. He’s not even certain there's a way back.

It's taken Ernő weeks to build this cube. But it will take him almost as long to figure out the solution to the puzzle he’s created—and he’ll have to use all his mother’s creative thinking, his father’s determination, and his own gifts of logic and patience to see it through.

Act Two: Color Parade

It’s June 1974, in Budapest, Hungary, two weeks after Ernő Rubik completed his prototype cube.

Ernő hunches in his swivel chair and stares in frustration at the cube on his desk. It’s surrounded by a clutter of notebooks, pencils, and empty coffee cups. What began as a neat-looking gadget to help his students has become an enigma. Ernő has inadvertently created a puzzle—one that’s so difficult that even he, its inventor, is struggling to solve it.

Because no matter what he does, the colors just won’t line up. Every move he makes that fixes one section jumbles another. The math is mind-bending. And as he works through the combinations, Ernő calculates that there can be more than 43 quintillion unique configurations, that’s 43 followed by eighteen zeros. And he can’t ask anyone for help or consult a textbook—because this is a problem entirely of his own making.

Today, though, proves a turning point. After more frustrating hours of sitting and thinking, Ernő believes he's spotted a pattern. He opens a fresh page and scribbles down a series of maneuvers—turn the top face clockwise, the right face up, then the top face counter-clockwise. With fingers sweaty and tender from days of twisting, he gingerly tests his theory. He makes the moves, and then makes them again, and again. And with a disbelieving thrill, Ernő finds what he’s been desperate for—a semblance of control.

Gradually, as the summer days pass, Ernő builds on his knowledge. He develops more specific sequences and starts to untangle the knot he’s made. First, he matches one face. Then he masters the middle layer. Then finally, with a rush of euphoria, he completes the last side. A full month after unthinkingly scrambling the cube, now all faces are restored to solid color.

And now that he knows how to solve his puzzle, it’s time to let others have a try.

When Ernő shows his students the cube, they are immediately fascinated. Even though they too find it maddeningly difficult, they can’t put it down—and when Ernő tells them there definitely is a solution, they just have to solve it. Seeing others share his obsession, Ernő realizes he has produced something far more interesting than a mere classroom tool.

So, he spends some time improving the internal mechanism and making the cube look as good as possible before applying for a patent. On January 30th, 1975, armed with knowledge of the bureaucratic process gained from his father, Ernő registers the cube as a “spatial logic toy”. The difficulty, though, is he is a college lecturer in a communist state. Hungary may have a reputation as one of the more open societies behind the Iron Curtain, but it’s still not exactly a prime location to take a commercial product to market. In a planned economy like Hungary's, toy production is a very low priority, and, in any case, the state-run companies he approaches are dismissive and uninterested in a game they deem too hard and too cerebral.

Finally, though, after a long and tireless search, Ernő convinces a small cooperative in Budapest to take a chance. As the company’s specialty is producing small plastic items like chess pieces, Ernő’s design is a bit of a stretch, especially the complex internal structure. Gearing up for production seems to take forever. But eventually, in late 1977, the first batch rolls off the assembly line. It's sold in local toy stores with the name Ernő has chosen for it—the Bűvös Kocka or “The Magic Cube.”

With zero advertising, Ernő watches his creation become a word-of-mouth success all around Budapest. Because, despite its intricacies, people cannot put it down. On trams, at parks and coffee shops, in line outside stores—Ernő observes with a quiet pride as more and more Hungarians become obsessed with solving his cube. And it's in a café that the toy is spotted by businessman Tibor Laci. Working for a foreign computer company and having corporate experience outside the country, he immediately sees the cube’s potential.

Tibor gains authorization from the state trading company to market the cube in the West, and Ernő meets with him in 1979 to discuss his plans. The two, though, are a mismatch—one a scruffy academic, and the other a sharp-suited entrepreneur—and Ernő can’t help being skeptical. To him, the idea that people outside Hungary would be interested in his invention seems somehow absurd.

Still, he’s willing to let Tibor try. And soon, Tibor will head West with Ernő’s Magic Cube. And there, this strange invention will get a new name—and become one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable products of the 20th century.

Act Three: Cube Crazy

It’s June 5th, 1982, at the Vigadó Concert Hall in Budapest, three years after Ernő Rubik met Tibor Laci.

16-year-old Minh Thai swallows hard and tries to concentrate. A Vietnamese refugee now living in Los Angeles, Minh is representing the United States at the first international Rubik’s Cube Championships. The competition is being broadcast live around the world, and Minh is anxious in front of the lights, the audience, and TV cameras. With the stars and stripes emblazoned proudly across his T-shirt, he takes one last deep breath and then steps up to the podium.

The first international Rubik’s Cube Championships features 19 participants from different countries around the world. Each competitor has three attempts at solving a Rubik’s Cube in the fastest time possible. Observing is a panel of judges, presided over by none other than Ernő Rubik himself.

Quickly, the timer starts, and Minh grabs the cube in front of him. His fingers and wrists dance around the block in a blur of color in complete silence, save for the squeaky clack of rotating plastic bricks. With a laser focus, Minh employs the instant calculations and refined technique of the “corners first” method, steering the pieces where he wants them. Then, he slams the solved puzzle down, and the clock stops at 22.95 seconds. It’s a new world record—and enough to win Minh first prize.

When businessman Tibor Laci took Ernő’s invention to the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1979, he was optimistic about the cube’s potential. But even he never predicted the sensation it became. Having been licensed by the Ideal Toy Company of America, it was officially renamed the “Rubik’s Cube” in honor of its creator. And now, the sense of frustration and thrill that Ernő first experienced in his bedroom workshop is shared by avid “cubers” across the globe.

And as the 1980s dawned, the Rubik’s Cube is already one of the biggest crazes of the decade. 100 million units have been sold—and by the end of 1983, that figure will double again. When Ernő sat at his desk, putting the finishing touches to his invention, there was no way he could have imagined the astonishing success that would follow. But through his passion, ingenuity. and patience, he became a surprise icon in the history of interactive design and puzzles—all thanks to a wooden prototype he completed on May 19th, 1974.

Outro

Next on History Daily. May 20th, 1875 - The Meter Convention is signed by 17 nations, establishing a system for standardizing measurements worldwide.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Bill Holland.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.