I see that aficionados are to celebrate the 25th birthday of Rubik’s Cube. I thought it was actually much older than that but it reminded me of an incident from my youth.
I did my degree at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London in the mid-70s. I met a Hungarian girl there (her family lived in Birmingham and were expatriates from the 1956 revolution) and we travelled back beyond the Iron Curtain to see her uncles and aunts and so on who still lived there. One evening we went to see one of her cousins in Budapest who, with her husband, was a postgraduate student in the Mathematics Department at the University of Budapest. While were sitting around eating goulash and drinking plum brandy, the husband tossed me what I would call a ‘plastic device’. He said his Professor had developed it as a way of introducing his students to the concept of logic. He wondered whether if might be of interest to people in the west. It looked appealing but as a non-mathematician I didn’t quite get it so on my return to the UK gave it to my younger brother who immediately worked it out and then put it in a drawer. If I say that the Hungarian Professor’s name was Rubik and the plastic device tossed over to me that evening was a cube with different coloured squares on it you know where we are going with this! Suffice to say that within 18 months Rubik’s Cube had become the bestselling toy worldwide and I had had my hands on an early example. When the game became such a phenomenon part of me wanted to say out loud ‘I saw that years ago’ but then another part of me said probable best to keep quiet. Anyway it is one of those ‘If only I’d known’ stories which Radio 4’s Saturday Live feature and indeed they did this morning.
Interestingly, I had a second chance in marketing toys and games because some years later when I was working for a printing company in Ipswich the boss came back from meeting some Canadians in New York who had invented a board game. He had negotiated the European rights. He said it was called Trivial Pursuit.
