What was the Rubik's Cube first called?
Ernő Rubik invented it in 1974 in Hungary as a teaching tool.
Ernő Rubik, a Hungarian architect and teaching professor at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest, built the first prototype in 1974 from wooden blocks as a way to show students three-dimensional movement. His real challenge came after finishing it: he scrambled the cube and had to work out how to restore it, which reportedly took him about a month. The Hungarian name was Bűvös kocka, the Magic Cube.
Rubik patented the design in Hungary in 1975 and the puzzle went on sale in 1977. Western distribution began in 1980 when the Ideal Toy Company licensed it and changed the name to Rubik's Cube, partly because a name tied to its inventor was easier to market. It became a worldwide craze in the early 1980s, and hundreds of millions of cubes have been sold in total.
The standard 3 by 3 cube has about 43 quintillion reachable arrangements (43,252,003,274,489,856,000). In 2010 a computer-assisted proof showed that any arrangement can be solved in at most 20 moves, a result called God's Number. Competitive speedcubing, with its own world records, has since reduced solving times to a few seconds. The internal mechanism of the puzzle, with its core and corner pieces holding together, is what lets the faces turn independently.