Hungarian architect Erno Rubik’s invention in the early 1970s changed the world of puzzles forever. Cubing has now seen a resurgence.

In the 2008 film Wall-E, a lonely robot on a post-apocalyptic Earth collects remnants of human civilisation. Among his conquests: a spork and a Rubik's Cube. "There's never been a puzzle quite like Rubik's Cube, and America may never be the same, " announced the Ideal Toy Corporation in an early 1980s commercial. It wasn't wrong. While teaching a class called Form Studies in the early 1970s, the Hungarian architect Erno Rubik had his students slice a large cube of foam horizontally and vertically. He quickly realised that you could rotate the top half relative to the bottom half, the puzzle expert Jerry Slocum says. "And that's where the idea of the Rubik's Cube came from.