50 Years of Rubik’s Cube: A Plastic Cube that Keeps the World in Suspense
From ABS plastic to recycled materials
U’ L’ ULUF U’ F’ – doesn’t mean anything to you? And yet you have probably already acted according to 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 Originally made of wood, it is now of course made of plastic (some of it even recycled) and is as popular as on the first day.
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to imagine that the development of the small cube took six years. But where rapid prototyping, fused deposition modeling and the like make development easier for us today, in the past there was nothing. The cube had to be designed and built by hand. In 1974, the 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, 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 and 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, distribution beyond the Iron Curtain was difficult. According to inventor Rubik (who was an architecture professor), it was simply too complex in the eyes of western companies. A toy that only a fraction of buyers would ever solve? Not interesting.
One company finally took the risk and estimated the sales figures (quite optimistically) at one million. Just off the mark: 30 million of the plastic cubes were sold worldwide in the first year. To date, the Rubik’s Cube has been sold almost 500 million times – about 52 times the current Hungarian population.
Today, the Rubik’s Cube brand belongs to the Spin Master company and is keeping up 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 from 100 percent recycled plastic, taking a big step towards sustainability in the plastics industry. It is made of 100 percent recycled plastic. But that’s not all in terms of 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.
So what is the cryptic combination “U’ L’ ULUF U’ F'” all about? It’s simple: Cubers use letter combinations like this to note down their movements. The letters stand for the side of the cube that is to be moved (U for Up, L for Left, F for Front, etc.). An apostrophe is added when the side is turned anti-clockwise. Mathematicians have been racking their brains for decades over the shortest solution to the Rubik’s Cube, the so-called God’s number.
Have you got a taste for it? To ensure 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.
The God’s 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, the German mathematician Herbert Kociemba and the Californian computer scientist Thomas Rokicki proved that the God’s number is 20.
Aside from the recycled plastic, the Rubik’s Cube is also keeping up with the times in terms of digitalization. It is also available equipped with Bluetooth, so that an app can track every movement. But whether old school or modern: the Rubik’s Cube has fascinated people for decades. Incidentally, its inventor needed over a month to solve it the first time. So don’t worry if it takes a little longer.
The Rubik’s Cube in numbers
- Records : Max Park solves the 2023 cube in 3.13 seconds. A robot from Mitsubishi Electric Corporation needs only 0.305 seconds.
- Size : The largest Rubik’s Cube is 21×21 squares.
- Solution : There are 43 trillion ways to solve the Rubik’s Cube. This number of cubes could cover the earth 200 times.
- Documentary : In 2020, Netflix released the documentary “The Speed Cubers”. Here, too, Max Park is one of the protagonists.
- Pop culture : The Rubik’s Cube also appears in films, for example in 2012 in “The Amazing Spiderman” with Andrew Garfield, in 1998 in “Armageddon” or in the animated children’s film “Wall-E”.
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