In March 1970, Larry D. Nichols invented a 2x2x2 "Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups" and filed a Canadian patent application for it.

On 9 April 1970, Frank Fox applied to patent an "amusement device", a type of sliding puzzle on a spherical surface with "at least two 3×3 arrays" intended to be used for the game of noughts and crosses.

[17] In the mid-1970s, Ernő Rubik worked at the Department of Interior Design at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest.

[18] Although it is widely reported that the Cube was built as a teaching tool to help his students understand 3D objects, his actual purpose was solving the structural problem of moving the parts independently without the entire mechanism falling apart.

[19] Rubik applied for a patent in Hungary for his "Magic Cube" (Hungarian: bűvös kocka) on 30 January 1975,[4] and HU170062 was granted later that year.

Magic Cube was held together with interlocking plastic pieces that prevented the puzzle from being easily pulled apart, unlike the magnets in Nichols's design.

With Ernő Rubik's permission, businessman Tibor Laczi took a Cube to Germany's Nuremberg Toy Fair in February 1979 in an attempt to popularise it.

[20] It was noticed by Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer, and they signed a deal with Ideal Toys in September 1979 to release the Magic Cube worldwide.

[20] Ideal wanted at least a recognisable name to trademark; that arrangement put Rubik in the spotlight because the Magic Cube was renamed after its inventor in 1980.

The puzzle made its international debut at the toy fairs of London, Paris, Nuremberg, and New York in January and February 1980.

[21] After its international debut, the progress of the Cube towards the toy shop shelves of the West was briefly halted so that it could be manufactured to Western safety and packaging specifications.

"The Gordian Knot" and "Inca Gold" were considered, but the company finally decided on "Rubik's Cube", and the first batch was exported from Hungary in May 1980.

[26] In March 1981, a speedcubing championship organised by the Guinness Book of World Records was held in Munich,[24] and a Rubik's Cube was depicted on the front cover of Scientific American that same month.

[39] Part of the new appeal was ascribed to the advent of Internet video sites, such as YouTube, which allowed fans to share their solving strategies.

The trademarks were upheld by a ruling of the General Court of the European Union on 25 November 2014 in a successful defence against a German toy manufacturer seeking to invalidate them.

However, European toy manufacturers are allowed to create differently shaped puzzles that have a similar rotating or twisting functionality of component parts such as for example Skewb, Pyraminx or Impossiball.

[53] To put this into perspective, if one had one standard-sized Rubik's Cube for each permutation, one could cover the Earth's surface 275 times, or stack them in a tower 261 light-years high.

Cubes have also been produced where the nine stickers on a face are used to make a single larger picture, and centre orientation matters on these as well.

For example, there are well-known algorithms for cycling three corners without changing the rest of the puzzle or flipping the orientation of a pair of edges while leaving the others intact.

[56] In addition, the fact that there are well-defined subgroups within the Rubik's Cube group enables the puzzle to be learned and mastered by moving up through various self-contained "levels of difficulty".

[58] Its relative nature allows algorithms to be written in such a way that they can be applied regardless of which side is designated the top or how the colours are organised on a particular cube.

One of the most common deviations from Singmaster notation, and in fact the current official standard, is to use "w", for "wide", instead of lowercase letters to represent moves of two layers; thus, a move of Rw is equivalent to one of r.[59] For methods using middle-layer turns (particularly corners-first methods), there is a generally accepted "MES" extension to the notation where letters M, E, and S denote middle layer turns.

The key difference is the use of the vowels O, A, and I for clockwise, anticlockwise, and twice (180-degree) turns, which results in word-like sequences such as LOTA RATO LATA ROTI (equivalent to LU′ R′ U L′ U′ R U2 in Singmaster notation).

In 1982, David Singmaster and Alexander Frey hypothesised that the number of moves needed to solve the Cube, given an ideal algorithm, might be in "the low twenties".

[62] In 2007, Daniel Kunkle and Gene Cooperman used computer search methods to demonstrate that any 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube configuration can be solved in 26 moves or fewer.

[75][76] In 1981, thirteen-year-old Patrick Bossert developed a solution for solving the cube, along with a graphical notation, designed to be easily understood by novices.

[79] Philip Marshall's The Ultimate Solution to Rubik's Cube takes a different approach, averaging only 65 twists yet requiring the memorisation of only two algorithms.

The user has to set the colour configuration of the scrambled cube, and the program returns the steps required to solve it.

[131] Another artist includes Robbie Mackinnon of Toronto Canada[132] with earliest published work in 2007[133] who claims to have developed his pointillist Cube Art years earlier while being a teacher in China.

[134] In 2010 artist Pete Fecteau created "Dream Big",[135] a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. using 4,242 officially licensed Rubik's Cubes.