The first cautious order arrived in 1977, for 5,000 items. Finally, on 28 October 1976, the Hungarian patent was registered for the Cube. In January 1975, I started the year by walking to the Hungarian Patents Office and filing a patent entitled the ‘Three-Dimensional Logic Game’. With his help, eventually the product was created. He asked me to make diagrams of the construction and its operation, and attach detailed descriptions. Maybe six months after the Cube came into the world, I felt it was time to move up a level, to think about how to put it into production, because it immediately turned out that it wasn’t just me who found it interesting. That was indeed the case, but something else was happening as well. The superficial observer might have thought I was preparing for my lessons, that I was figuring out what I was going to present to my students in class. Among them were even a few cubes: paper, wood, monochrome, multi-coloured and solid cubes, and those consisting of smaller pieces.

They also hung from the ceiling, the door and the window frame. WLB: From your original idea, how long did it take for you to reach something close to the finished product, the Rubik’s Cube?ĮR: In the spring of 1974, my 30th birthday was approaching, and my room was like a schoolboy’s jacket pocket, full of all sorts of trash and treasure: scraps of paper, hard-to-read notes, drawings, pencils, crayons, bits of string, little sticks of wood, glue, tacks, springs, screws, rulers, on the shelves, on the floor and on my folding design table.

Since then, a number of other territories have been signed up in other languages for Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All, which is available (or will be available) in Korean, Chinese, Russian, Italian and Spanish, among others. It’s now two years since we agreed with an American and then a British publisher on this year’s release. It was important for the work to be created in English because the goal was for it to be read all over the world. Now all I hope is to be able to trust the readers to decide how they think about its structure, and I trust they are smarter than I am. Of course, in the real world, things don’t work that way. Originally, I didn’t want there to be chapters in it either, I somehow imagined it would have neither a beginning nor an end. When I started, I decided that the book would not have a traditional structure. We Love Budapest: Why have you decided to write your book now, and why in English?Įrnő Rubik: I have reservations about writing and speaking in English, but I wanted a book that told the story of the mysterious existence of the Cube in the world, how I saw the background.

Cubed by erno rubik