Cube mania was one of the defining features of the early 80s. It is estimated that an eighth of the world’s population has played with Erno Rubik’s infuriating but compelling toy.

Rubik was born in Budapest in 1944. His parents were ideal for a budding inventor: his mother was a poet and a ‘dreamer’ and his father an engineer-mechanic. Erno studied sculpture for his first degree, but then switched to architecture at the Academy of Applied Arts and Design. He was teaching interior design there when he came up with the invention that would change his life.

In the spring of 1974, Rubik was wrestling with the structural problem of designing a block of cubes in which each cube was able to move independently without the whole falling apart. At first he experimented with rubber bands, but the solution was to have the blocks hold themselves together by virtue of their shapes. Soon he had constructed a cube made up of 26 ‘cubies’ (not 27 as it appeared from the outside, as the one the middle was ‘missing’). He marked each side with a different colour and started twisting. It took him a month to get back the original pattern.

Rubik applied for a Hungarian patent in January 1975, receiving approval two years later. The first cubes appeared in the shops towards the end of 1977. Sales were slow until an entrepreneur named Tibor Laczi saw a waiter fiddling with one while having having a coffee. He immediately traced the device to Rubik and arranged a meeting. ‘I felt like giving him some money’, he later recalled. ‘He looked like a beggar. He was terribly dressed, and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But I knew I had a genius on my hands. I told him we could sell millions.’

The following day, Tibor went to the state trading company to seek permission to market the Cube in the West. Then he took it to the Nuremberg toy fair and wandered around playing with it. Here he bumped into British toy expert Tom Kremer, who was entranced, and subsequently ordered a million. Before long, Rubik had become the Eastern Bloc’s first self-made millionaire.

Since 1977, over 100 million Cubes have been sold worldwide. Rubik has since invented other mind-bending puzzles, including the Snake, the Triamid, the Soma Cube and Magic Rings, but none has captured the world’s imagination in the same way as the device that drove so many of us demented during the 80s.