Rubik's Cube

Link to more photos. 

I have a collection of Rubik's Cubes and similar objects, about 20 of them (See the photo album.)

When I first read about it, in a fourth-generation copy of an article in a German magazine, I couldn't see how it was possible —  how a cube of smaller cubes could possibly rotate slices in all three dimensions. 

At the time, they were only available in Europe, not in the U.S. My Occidental math faculty colleague Don Goldberg managed to get one from abroad, and I borrowed it for a day. In that time, I did learn how to fix one side, but that's all I could reliably do.

Sometime later, the May Co. department store was the first place in town to have Rubik's Cube to sell. As a promotion, they advertised that, for one day, they would be giving $50 gift certificates to anyone who could solve one side in three minutes.

I went there on that day as soon as they opened, and I was one of the first set of three people who were given a chance. Of course, I won a $50 gift certificate. As the day went on, more and more Oxy students were showing up and winning. They quickly cut back to one group of three contestants every hour instead of every thirty minutes, and long before the day was done, they stopped the promotion altogether. Oxy students who never got a chance protested, and there was even some TV coverage of it all.

In his 1981 book, Notes on Rubik's Magic Cube, David Singmaster writes, "A Los Angeles department store offered $50 to anyone who could put one face right in three minutes.  They lost $600 to a group of Don Goldberg's students at Occidental College."

For years afterwards, I bought and received as gifts many variations of the cube. I also participated in the Cube-Lovers email group (now long gone).