The Click Moment by Frans Johansson

Author:Frans Johansson [Johansson, Frans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101601402
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

3. Follow Your Curiosity

The Rubik’s Cube burst on to the scene in all of its primary-colors glory in the early 1980s. It was the fad to end all fads. Full-sized cubes, cube key chains, and Rubik’s Minis were in every car, bedroom, book bag, and holiday stocking across the land. One of the most successful toys in history, the Cube sold over 350 million units and made its creator one of the richest men in Hungary. More recently, the Rubik’s Cube experienced a resurgence of popularity. Competitions have been hosted in Canada, the United States, and other parts of the world. The objective is to solve the cube in as few seconds as possible…blindfolded.

What type of mind created this maddening and clever little puzzle? Was he brilliant? Analytical? A mathematical savant? No, not in the usual sense of those terms. In fact, it would be just as fair to say that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The Rubik’s Cube wasn’t the work of careful planning or market research; instead, it was the result of a nagging sense of curiosity that just wouldn’t let up.

Erno Rubik was born in Budapest, Hungary, to an engineer father and a poet mother. As a professor of interior design, Rubik became fascinated by the idea of creating a structure that maintained its integrity of shape yet allowed individual objects to move within it. “Space always intrigued me, with its incredibly rich possibilities” Rubik once wrote. “I think the Cube arose from this interest, from this search for expression and for this always more increased acuteness of these thoughts.” At age twenty-nine, he filled a small room in his mother’s apartment with objects attached to blocks by elastic bands. The blocks were separate from each other, but once assembled they formed a cube. As he twisted them into place the elastic holding them together began to snap. Driven by curiosity, he developed a genuinely simple but brilliant solution to the problem: Rubik connected the cubes by carving tiny notches within the squares and attaching color-coated stickers to identify the individual squares. With his cube completed, he twisted the squares and confirmed that the shape remained intact.

“It was wonderful,” he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, “to see how, after only a few turns, the colors became mixed, apparently in random fashion. It was tremendously satisfying to watch this color parade.” But now Rubik had a new problem: he had no idea how to solve his puzzle and put the colors back in order. Something inside of him clicked into place. He said it was like staring at a secret code. “But for me, it was a code I myself had invented…yet I could not read it. I simply could not accept it.”

It takes the current record holder exactly 5.66 seconds to solve the Cube, but it took Erno Rubik, the guy who invented the puzzle, one and a half months to do the same thing. During that time it was curiosity—almost an obsessive curiosity—that allowed him to focus on the secret code until it was cracked.

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