Ernõ Rubik invented the Cube in the spring of 1974 in his home town of Budapest, Hungary. He wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry and ended up creating the world’s best selling toy. Rubik’s inspiration for the Cube’s internal mechanism came from pebbles in the River Danube whose edges had been smoothed away. Rubik called his invention the ‘Magic Cube’. It was renamed the Rubik’s Cube by the Ideal Toy Corporation in 1980. More than 300 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold worldwide. If all the cubes were placed on top of each other it would be enough to reach the North Pole from the South Pole! At the height of the Rubik’s craze in the mid-1980s, it was estimated that one-fifth of the world’s population had played the Cube. ‘Cubing’ still infects people of all ages. ‘Cubaholics’ are said to suffer from ‘Rubik's wrist’ and ‘Cubist's thumb’!