Bűvös Kocka was patented in Hungary in 1975: a plastic cube, made up of nine coloured squares on each side, that could be rearranged in 43 quintillion different ways. Eight years later over 200 million had been sold worldwide.
Today in pulp... I look at Rubik's Cube!
In 1974 Ernõ Rubik was an architecture professor from Budapest. Looking for a way to help his students better appreciate 3D design he began work on a wooden puzzle block that could be reconfigured by twisting it.
The challenge for Rubik was to create a structure where individual pieces could move without the whole block falling apart. Using rubber bands and hand-cut wooden pieces he persevered until he had a prototype.
Rubik's students liked his 3D block, but it wasn't until he added coloured stickers to the pieces that he appreciated that it could also be a puzzle - and a fiendishly difficult one to solve!
Rubik's Magic Cubes - Bűvös Kocka - went on sale in 1977. Two years later businessman Tibor Laczi took it to the Nuremburg Toy Fair where it caught the eye of Tom Kremer, who persuaded the Ideal Toy Company to aquire the rights. He could see it's worldwide potential.
Cube manufacturing was refined, using a lighter design that was more easy to use. Ideal wanted to rename the puzzle 'The Gordian Knot', but eventually settled on a simpler idea: Rubik's Cube. It went on sale in the West in 1980.
Backed by a strong advertising campaign the Rubik's Cube soon became a worldwide craze, briefly becoming the best-selling toy in history. Yet it was a puzzle that very few could solve.
However help was at hand...
'Schoolboy cubemaster' Patrick Bossett spent two weeks figuring out how to do the Cube in 1981, when he was laid up with a broken leg. His solution went on to sell 1.5 million copies. Bossett later developed software for identifying computers at risk of the Millenium Bug.
Despite launching other products - such as the Rubik's Snake - the Rubikmania began to evaporate in 1982, and by the following year many felt it had just been a fad.
But to a hard-core of cubers it was anything but.
Speedcubers try to solve the Rubik's Cube as quickly as possible. At the first world championships in 1982 Minh Thai won with a single solve time of 22.95 seconds. The current fastest time for a single solve of a 3x3 cube by a human is 3.47 seconds.
Speedcubers quickly improved on the earlier cube solutions and a number of competing methods were discovered. Jessica Fridrich's method (solving the first two layers before orientation the top layer) is the most popular speedcuber method, but there are many more.
The Fridrich method involves memorizing at least 50 algorithms, depending on the position of the edge or corner pieces you need to move. When Fridrich posted these on the internet in 1997 it helped spark a renewed wave of interest in Rubik's Cube.
In 2000, Ron van Bruchem started an online forum called speedcubing.com and in 2003 the World Speedcube Championships were relaunched in Toronto. The cubing community has carried on from strength to strength ever since.
Nowadays cubers tackle Rubik's Cubes of various sizes: 3x3, 5x5, even 17x17. A Braille version of the cube is also available for people with visual impairments.
Special speedcubes are also available for faster rotation of the layers, though a bit of cube lube on your old one will normally help to improve your performance too.
Scientists and mathematicians love the Rubik's Cube: as an exercise in engineering, topology and mathematical group theory it's hard to beat. Scientific America even dedicates a cover to the maths of the Cube.
In 2010 'God's Number' for the Rubik's Cube was discovered: it can be solved from any start position in 20 moves or less. It took the equivalent of 35 CPU years using Google's processing infrastructure to compute all the possible start positions.
So if you haven't cubed for a while why not dig out your old Rubik's Cube and have a go. There's also a number of Cube solver sites online in case you get stuck!
More toy stories another time...
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He was the terror of London; a demonic figure with glowing eyes and fiery breath who could leap ten feet high. The penny dreadfuls of the time wrote up his exploits in lurid terms. But who was he really?
Today I look at one of the earliest pulp legends: Spring-Heeled Jack!
London has always attracted ghosts, and in the 19th Century they increasingly left their haunted houses and graveyards and began to wader the capital's streets.
But one apparition caught the Victorian public attention more than most...
In October 1837 a 'leaping character' with a look of the Devil began to prey on Londoners. Often he would leap high into the air and land in front of a carriage, causing it to crash. It would then flee with a high-pitched laugh.
Today in pulp I look back at New Zealand's home-grow microcomputer, the 1981 Poly-1!
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The Poly-1 was developed in 1980 by two electronics engineering teachers at Wellington Polytechnic, Neil Scott and Paul Bryant, who wanted to create a computer for use in New Zealand schools. Education Minister Merv Wellington liked the idea and gave it the green light.
Backed by government finances, and in partnership with Progeni Computers, Polycorp was formed in 1980 to began work on the prototype for the official Kiwi school computer.
It was the biggest manhunt in Britain: police, the press, aeroplanes, psychics all tried to solve the disappearance. In the end nobody really knew what happened. It was a mystery without a solution.
This is the story of Agatha Christie's 11 lost days...
By 1926 Agatha Christie's reputation as a writer was starting to grow. Her sixth novel - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - had been well-received and she and her husband Archie had recently concluded a world tour. But all was not well with the marriage.
In April 1926 Agatha Christie’s mother died. Christie was very close to her: she had been home-schooled and believed her mother was clairvoyant. The shock of her sudden death hit the author hard.
Many readers have asked me over the years what my definition of pulp is. I've thought about it a lot, and the definition I keep coming back to... well it may surprise you.
Let me try and set it out.
There are lots of definitions of pulp out there: in books, in academic papers and on the web. And most circle back to the same three points: the medium, the story type and the method of writing.
Pulp is of course a type of cheap, coarse paper stock. Its use in magazine production from the 1890s onwards led to it becoming a shorthand term for the kind of fiction found in low cost story magazines.
let's take a look at the extraordinary work of Victorian illustrator and cat lover Louis Wain!
Louis Wain was born in London in 1860. Although he is best known for his drawings of cats he started out as a Victorian press illustrator. His work is highly collectable.
Wain had a very difficult life; born with a cleft lip he was not allowed to attend school. His freelance drawing work supported his mother and sisters after his father died. Aged 23 he married his sisters' governess, Emily Richardson, 10 years his senior.
Over the years a number of people have asked me if I have a favourite pulp film. Well I do. It's this one.
This is the story of Alphaville...
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) was Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature film. A heady mix of spy noir, science fiction and the Nouvelle Vague at its heart is a poetic conflict between a hard-boiled secret agent and a supercomputer’s brave new world.
British writer Peter Cheyney had created the fictitious American investigator Lemmy Caution in 1936. As well as appearing in 10 novels Caution featured in over a dozen post-war French films, mostly played by singer Eddie Constantine whom Godard was keen to work with.