The first person to solve a Rubik’s Cube spent a month struggling to unscramble it.

It was the puzzle’s creator, an unassuming Hungarian architecture professor named Erno Rubik. When he invented the cube in 1974, he wasn’t sure it could ever be solved. Mathematicians later calculated that there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways to arrange the squares, but just one of those combinations is correct. On the original classic Rubik's Cube, each of the six faces was covered by nine stickers, each of one of six solid colours: white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. Some later versions of the cube have been updated to use coloured plastic panels instead, which prevents peeling and fading. Since 1988, the arrangement of colours has been standardised with white opposite yellow, blue opposite green, and orange opposite red, and the red, white, and blue arranged clockwise in that order. On early cubes, the position of the colours varied from cube to cube.

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