Every invention has an official birth date.
For the Cube this date is 1974 when the first working prototype came into being and a patent application was initially drafted. The place was Budapest, the capital of Hungary. The inventor's name is now a household word. At the time, Erno Rubik was a lecturer at the Department of Interior Design at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest. Although 1974 marks the inauguration of the Cube, the processes that led to the invention began a few years earlier.