Can you guess the best selling single toy of all time? Is it the slinky? Silly putty? If you guessed the Rubik’s Cube, you are correct. Over 350 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold, and more are being purchased every day.

The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian named Erno Rubik. Erno was a sculptor and a professor of architecture. The cube was first sold in Budapest in 1977. It was known as the Hungarian Magic Cube. Then, in 1980, it became known as the Rubik’s Cube and was sold all over the world.

The original Rubik’s Cube has six faces with nine stickers on each side. The colors are white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. The standard Rubik’s Cube is three blocks across, three blocks down, and three blocks deep. Some cubes are produced with two or four blocks in each direction. The largest cube on record has twenty-two.

Rubik’s Cubes can be rotated and twisted to align the colored stickers. The goal of the puzzle is to get each side to be all one color. Solving the Rubik’s cube involves logic and patterns. There are multiple ways to solve it, and people have named and popularized their own methods over the years.

For some people, just solving the puzzle is not enough. They want to solve it in record time. This practice is known as speedcubing or speedsolving. The World Cubing Association holds speedsolving events every year. In 1982, the first Rubik’s Cube world championship was held in Budapest, Hungary. The winner was Minh Thai, a Vietnamese student from Los Angeles. He solved the puzzle cube in 22.95 seconds.

Speedcubing isn’t the only competition hosted by the World Cubing Association. They also sponsor events where people solve the Rubik’s cube with one hand, with their feet, or while blindfolded.

The Rubik’s Cube is simple yet challenging. It is colorful, fun, and relatively inexpensive. It is easy to understand why this Magic Cube became, and stayed, so popular.