A history of the idea and development of Rubik's Cube has been added. The page covers some puzzles and patents that came before the Rubik's Cube patent and the idea, design, patent, and manufacturing of Rubik's Cube. Click below to see the page.

Rubik's Cube History

Welcome to cubinghistory.com. The goal is to cover as much of the history of the puzzle community as possible. A lot has been uncovered and many questions have been answered, but there is still much more to do.

The most recent example is the origin of 2GLL. The last layer has been generated by several people. However, for the specific singling out of 2GLL as a useful step, Bernard Helmstetter's algorithms are the earliest found. Helmstetter generated this algorithm set for the Petrus method, which traditionally ends the solve by orienting the corners then permuting the edges. Helmstetter is the same one who identified solving the last layer in a single step when all edges are oriented and generated the algorithms. This was also done for the Petrus method.

Additional discoveries that have been made since the start of this project.

• The first known publication of the F2L pairing technique.
• The first known publication of cross and layer by layer.
• Contributors to the standard 3x3 notation. David Singmaster developed the U, D, L, R, F, B outer turn notation and the use of ' and 2 for notating directions. Slice turns, wide turns, rotations, and others were developed by additional individuals.