#118: Rubik’s Cube – Teaching Device or Toy?

The Empire Builders Podcast

An accident that really happened by an accident. Erno Rubik created his cube to visualize 3D space, but people just wanted to solve a puzzle.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Simple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen Sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. Here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here alongside Stephen Simple. Stephen, you told me the topic today, and of course I know about it.

Stephen Semple:

Of course you do.

Dave Young:

I might even be able to guess the guy’s first name and that I know that he was an Eastern European, but probably Russian, Erno Rubik, the inventor of the… Is it Erno?

Stephen Semple:

It is.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple:

Well done. Bing, Bing, bing, gold star, bing, bing.

Dave Young:

Bing, bing.

Erno Rubik. We’re going to talk about Rubik’s Cube.

Stephen Semple:

Correct.

Dave Young:

Erno is the Rubik in question. It was the big toy when I was a kid. I’m thinking eighties, early eighties, late seventies. Is that kind of… My frustration with it is I’ve never been able to do it. I can’t solve a Rubik’s cube to save my life.

Stephen Semple:

I’m with you.

Dave Young:

I know people that can just, the ones that can go click, click, click, click, click, click, click and done.

Stephen Semple:

I hate them.

Dave Young:

Dang.

With a passion. With a passion.

Stephen Semple:

I hate them. Yeah. Well, and when you say going on to be big, it went on to become the bestselling toy of all time, so big? Yes. The biggest, in fact, the biggest, in fact. The idea started in the 1970s, and if we go back to the 1970, games were primarily puzzles. And puzzles were kind of getting boring. Video games had just come out and were proving to be super popular, and were impacting other games. Other games and toys all started to incorporate lights and sounds and electronics. You remember Battleship? Battleship suddenly had sound effects where instead of you just saying, “You sank my battleship,” you pressed a little sound and there’d be a little explosion and all that other stuff.

Toys were all starting to incorporate this stuff, and Milton Bradley even predicted the time that every toy in the future would be electronic. That was the mindset at that moment. Then along comes Rubik’s Cube with no electronics, no sound effects, sells 3 million units in three years and goes on to become the bestselling toy of all time. It’s 1974, Erno Rubik is the professor at the Hungary College of Applied Arts, which at that time is part of the Soviet Union, so it’s behind the wall.

Dave Young:

Yeah, it’s part of the whole deal.

Stephen Semple:

He’s a trained architect and he’s teaching architecture and design. His father’s an engineer, his mother’s a poet, and he’s really interested with how people interact with things. He would teach a class on how to do 3-D drawings, and he would start with a cube. When drawing, you can only see three sides at a time. This started out not as a toy, but as a teaching device. He wanted to get across the idea of thinking in three dimensions. How can you rotate things around a core? How does this impact the relationship to each one of the sides? He creates this cube where you can rotate the sides.

Dave Young:

Amazing, okay.

Stephen Semple:

But he still needs to track the movement to show the special relationships. He puts stickers on the faces, but as he starts to turn it, he realizes, “How do I get things to line up again?” When he tries to move it to solve it, he makes it worse. We’ve experienced that, right, Dave?

Dave Young:

Oh God, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Suddenly it’s not a teaching tool, it’s a puzzle.

Dave Young:

Yeah. How do I get it back to the start? I know it can be done because I undid it.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

There’s no easy solution. It’s like the couch that came into the room, “It got in here, so I know I can get it out.” At the time, he has no idea how complex this is, and he’s fiddling with it. A month later, he’s still not solved it, and he feels like, “You should be able to solve this.”

Dave Young:

Right? Yeah. I’m glad to hear that he couldn’t do it either.

Stephen Semple:

Solving the cube requires 3-D awareness and he suddenly solves it and he feels the thrill. But here’s the problem, and we’ve covered this in other podcasts such as Tetris, he’s in a communist country, Hungary, and no one can create anything, the government does. Everything is owned by the government. All ideas are owned by the government. How do you monetize the idea? He’s the son of an aviation engineer, and his dad does own some patents, so it is possible in Hungary, but it takes quite a while to get a patent,

He eventually does, and he names it Magic Cube and releases it in Hungary, and it slowly gets a bit of a fan base, but he can’t get it beyond the Iron Curtain. Now, Hungary is closer to the west than the rest of the communist Russia, and he’s able to send the cube to a West German toy fair. Remember, it’s called Magic Cube, and only one toy company is interested. The Ideal Toy Company needs a hit. They haven’t had a hit in a while. They send Stuart Sims to Hungary to investigate this idea. Stuart looks at this. Basically, he’s handed one of these cubes. He looks at it, he fiddles with it, and he doesn’t believe it’s able to be solved. He hands it back to Rubik and he says, “Can you solve it?”

Dave Young:

Can’t be done.

Stephen Semple:

Can’t be done, can’t be solved. Imagine the pressure in that moment. Rubik manages to solve it, and they all feel the thrill.

Dave Young:

Nice.

Stephen Semple:

That’s the key to a game, the thrill, right? The next thing Stewart says is he hates the name, hates the name Magic Cube. He wants to call it Rubik’s Cube. Rubik agrees to change the name. It becomes Rubik’s Cube. Three years later, a hundred million sold and becomes the bestselling toy of all time. But it started off as a teaching aid.

Dave Young:

I love that. I love that. It started off as, and you can see it being used, right? You divide a cube into thirds, in three different dimensions and then rotate one.

Stephen Semple:

Right?

Dave Young:

What a great tool for teaching three-dimensional thinking. Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

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Dave Young:

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Let’s pick up our story where we left off. Trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

I have to give Rubik a lot of credit here. He created this as a teaching thing, but he saw its potential as a toy, and let’s not discount that. There are so many things where people, because their mind isn’t open for it, and it could work so much better somewhere else, don’t do it. This is what amazed me when we did way back, one of the early episodes on DoorDash where they had originally sought… They were creating software for the restaurant business that was solving a different problem.

When they went in to talk to the restaurateurs, the restaurateurs are going, “That’s not a problem, but can you solve this problem?” They went, “Oh, we could use this to solve this problem,” and suddenly that they were in a different business. Then LaFleur where she really was a pioneer in the whole idea of shipping dresses to people. It’s like it would be easy to sit there and go, “Oh, well, yeah, it’d be obvious it’s a toy,” not. Really keeping your mind open to these opportunities is a huge thing. He didn’t set out to build a toy, set out to build a teaching device that ended up becoming an awesome toy.

Dave Young:

You could develop it as a drawing of cubes and try to explain that. That’s probably how he started.

Stephen Semple:

It is how he started.

Dave Young:

Build it in actual physical space, so you can actually manipulate it. I can say I’ve never solved one, but they are fun to just handle and manipulate.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

It’s a nice toy to have in your hands and just fiddle with.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

There’s a huge market for fidget toys. We’ve seen fidget spinners. You could almost make the case that the Rubik’s Cube was probably used as a fidget toy as much, if not more so than as a fun puzzle to solve. Everybody had one and everybody played with it, but there weren’t that many people that could just whip it back into its solved position as we speak. I’m the kind of person that if I don’t have stuff in my hands that I’m playing with, when we’re doing recordings like this, there’s a real chance that I’m going to click off to another tab and just be on Facebook or somewhere and you’ll be telling me some really interesting facet of the story. I’m like, “Wait, what?”

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, Dave, back here.

Dave Young:

When you told me the topic I even showed you, I have this little fidget toy that’s nothing but aluminum cubes that are hinged together in weird ways, and you can just fold it and unfold it, and fold it and unfold it. Every single side of the cube is blue.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

There’s no unsolved position on this. It’s a Rubik’s Cube. In fact, it made me think that’s the Rubik’s Cube that I want is where all six sides are the same color.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, there you go.

Dave Young:

I look like a genius.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. There’s this magic of fiddling with it. It’s funny, you talk about fidget toys and whatnot. My oldest daughter, Crystal, she’s gone back to the world’s oldest fidget toy, which is knitting.

Dave Young:

Oh yeah.

Stephen Semple:

She describes it as, “A quiet fidget toy.” It’s one that you can do and it’s nice and quiet, but the world’s oldest fidget toy knit or crochet, one of those two.

Dave Young:

Right, dude. Yeah. I’m the guy that’ll sit in a meeting and take a pen apart.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Yeah. Guilty. But it’s very cool when you think he was trying to solve this problem and also recognizing that it’s one thing to show it, and it’s one thing to draw it, and it’s another thing to manipulate it. What I can imagine is that moment where he goes, “Okay, I’m going to put colors on the sides and I’m going to twist it, and I’m going to twist it. Okay, now I’m going to twist it back.” It’s like-

Dave Young:

“And I can’t.”

“Oh crap, I can’t.”

Stephen Semple:

Spending literally a month, and he’s an expert at thinking in 3-D, spending a month going, “It has to be possible.”

Dave Young:

Yeah. Yeah. It has to be. Right? If you really want to screw with somebody, if you figure out how to take a Rubik’s Cube apart and put one of the cubes back in just 90 degrees off, give it little… My kids would take them apart. They’re kind of an interesting, even mechanical principle on how they work. But yeah, I love that it started off as just a teaching tool and accidentally became a puzzle, because I used to take apart a lot of things when I was a kid. My dad would bring gear home and I’d take it apart, and I never had a thought about putting it back together again. It was all stuff that didn’t work anyway. I learned how to disassemble electronics, but never put any together. I like this story. Man, that’s success. Right? Biggest seller of all time.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. The other pressure moment is when he, he’s handed the thing by Stuart and says, “Okay, I don’t think it’s possible. You have to prove it.” All of a sudden it’s like, “I got to do it right now quickly, or I got no sale.”

Dave Young:

Pressure’s on.

Then it’s just called the Random Cube, and it’s a fidget toy. Oh look, I accidentally got it to be all six colors on the same sides. [inaudible 00:14:24]

Then just one magic day that it’s like, “Oh, look at that.” What a fun story to pick apart.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, and twist it around.

Dave Young:

Twist it around.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Thanks David.

Dave Young:

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