“In its arranged state it suggests calm, peace, a sense of order, security…in sharp contrast to all that the working object means once it is brought to life, to motion. There is something terrifying in its calm state, like a wild beast at rest, a tiger in repose, its power lurking.” Erno Rubrik, Discover, 1986
Kuiper was super proud of himself for solving this @bestwestern #rubikscube in under 3 minutes in Murdo, SD! He says he could have done it faster, but he’s a little out of practice. The lady at the desk said that she was very impressed, but that we still had to pay the pet fee.
Did you know that in 1974 it took the inventor of the Rubik’s cube a month to solve his own puzzle for the first time? In an interview he said, ”It was wonderful to see how, after only a few turns, the colors became mixed, apparently in random fashion. It was tremendously satisfying to watch this color parade. Like after a nice walk when you have seen many lovely sights you decide to go home, after a while I decided it was time to go home, let us put the cubes back in order. And it was at that moment that I came face to face with the Big Challenge: What is the way home?” After solving his own puzzle, he proudly showed his mother, whom he lived with at the time. She was delighted that he was finally done with it and could move on to something presumably more productive.
The first tour of the Rubik’s cube at toy fairs was a complete flop; it was displayed on a shelf with 100s of other toys and no one at the booth bothered to demo it. Fortunately, a dude named Tibor Laczi stopped to get a coffee one day and saw a waiter fiddling with one. He bought the cube for $1, ordered a few more, and wandered around the Nuremberg international toy fair showing them off. The result was an order of a million cubes from the Ideal Toy Corporation.
The Rubik’s cube, like a lot of inventions, also has a pretty bizarre history with international patent law, which is too complicated to recount here but is worth looking up. Several people patented similar toys in a few different countries around the same time period.
Original post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BYchZBWAxWz/