Erno Rubik demonstrates how to use Rubik's Cube. Photograph by John Glanville. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.

The multicolored puzzle known as Rubik's Cube became a worldwide sensation in the 1980s, inspiring clubs, books, newsletters, and even a Saturday morning cartoon (see entry under 1960s—TV and Radio in volume 4).

Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik (1944–) came up with the idea for the cube in the early 1970s as a teaching tool for his students. Always interested in geometry, Rubik devised a six-sided puzzle with fifty-four colored squares. The object of the puzzle was to get each side to line up entirely as one solid color. It sounded simple, but users quickly discovered how difficult it was. Mathematicians have calculated that there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations to Rubik's Cube, but only one correct solution. The deceptive simplicity of the puzzle proved to...