🟦🟥🟨
Spatial Logical Toy
U.S. Patent 4,378,116 · 1983
From the abstract
A spatial logical toy comprising a multiplicity of toy elements assembled into a substantially regular geometrical body and movable in a regular pattern with respect to each other along predetermined paths, the surfaces of the body being divided into colored or patterned fields that can be brought into different arrangements.
Note
The Rubik's Cube. Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor and architecture professor, built the first prototype in his Budapest apartment in 1974 — to teach his students about three-dimensional geometry. He didn't realize it was a puzzle until he scrambled it and tried to put it back. It took him a month to solve. The Hungarian patent was filed 1975; the U.S. patent only in 1980 after the Cold War licensing tangle was resolved. By 1983, the year of the U.S. patent, more than 100 million had sold worldwide. The current speed-solving record is 3.13 seconds.