Columnists
Imagining the Cube
If I hadn’t already made my fortune as a weekly columnist with the Wellington Times, I would like to have made it as an inventor. But not just any inventor. No improved industrial sludge separators or high efficiency potato peelers for me. I would prefer to have invented a toy. But not just any toy. It would have to have been a toy that was elegantly simple in its conception and involved no computer coding prowess. In other words, I would like to have invented the Rubik’s Cube.
The multicoloured block manipulation puzzle was instead invented in 1974 by Hungarian university professor Erno Rubik, who was looking for a way to interest his students in mathematics. Launched worldwide in 1980, the Cube has sold hundreds of millions (by one estimate, 350 million units by 2001), and seems to have gained a foothold that not even computer gaming can dislodge.
The Cube is six-sided, and consists of nine panels per side. The panels come in six colours. The Cube can be reconfigured simply by twisting a row of panels in any direction. The aim of the game is to take a random configuration and twist it back into a state where each of the six faces of the Cube is filled with one and only one colour. It sounds simple, but there are 43 quintillion panel combinations (Actually, there are more, but I’ve rounded the exact number down to the nearest quintillion). Small wonder that I have never been able to solve the puzzle in 40 years of trying.
There is a whole Rubik’s subculture out there. There are said to be some 40,000 YouTube channels dealing with Cube issues. A World Cube Association was formed in 2017 to bring order to all things Rubikian. Special cubing skills are recognized; For example, the ‘speed cubing’ world record is held by a 22-year old Australian man who solved it in 4.22 seconds, smashing the old record of 4.59 seconds. The ‘stunt cubing’ records are even more eye popping. One fellow solved 254 cubes while running a marathon, eight cubes underwater while holding his breath, and 5,800 cubes in a single 24-hour period. And the record for ‘blindfolded cubing’ (where the cuber gets to inspect the randomly configured cube but then solves it blindfolded) is 48 in one hour.
Mr. Rubik has left a legacy of which he can be proud. He has also done fairly well for himself financially. To add to the revenue he has received to date, he recently sold the rights to the Cube to Canada’s Spinmaster corporation for $50 million. That will buy him an ice cream sundae at the dairy bar every day for the rest of his life, with a little change left over. It compares on the high end to the $75 million the Disney corporation paid to acquire the Muppets in 2004, and on the low end to the $13 million Spinmaster paid to acquire the rights to the Meccano toy in 2013.
Did it pay too little or too much? Spinmaster (based in Toronto) is a big corporation, with a presence in 16 countries and $1.5 billion in annual sales, that can look after itself. It has experience acquiring legacy toys, as in addition to the Meccano purchase, it picked up the rights to the Etch a Sketch in 2016. So if Mr. Rubik is happy with it, so should we all be.
Successful toys are valuable commodities and toy licensing is big business. The Lego group has annual revenue in the order of $6 billion. The Super Soaker water gun has brought in over $1 billion. Playmobil generates about $750 million In annual revenue. Barbie generated over $1.1 billion in sales in 2019. But the biggest of all might be the Transformer toy. Highly profitable in its own right, it became a movie franchise that has brought in profit of over $3 billion.
Of course, the key word is “successful.” The road to hell is no doubt littered with good idea toys that for one reason or another couldn’t be turned into successes. And yet without the idea, you’ll never succeed as an inventor.
But is there in fact anything left to invent? After all, we’ve already had the Yo-Yo, the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee and the Slinky, all of which are still going strong. The Rubik’s Cube proves that there is always room for another simple product. All it takes is the person with the imagination—whom you won’t find of page eight of The Times.
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