RubikCubism2

A couple of decades ago I met a Founding Father of Rubik's-Cube Culture in the USA. A few days later I posted my notes on the visit to the "Cube-Lovers" list on USENET. Lest we forget, slightly edited, those notes:

• I visited Bela Szalai, an IBM computer engineer, on Saturday, 23 August 1980. His country home near Manassas battlefield (aka Bull Run in northern Virginia) is Logical Games Incorporated (LGI). He and his family comprise the employees.
• Bela first saw the Cube in August of 1978, during a trip to visit his relatives in Hungary. After many delays he was able to get some Cubes wholesale from the Hungarian government --- but the Communist bureaucracy wanted $1 million for exclusive rights to distribute the things in the Western world.
• Ideal (a major toy company) may have learned of the Cube from Bernie DeKovon, a Games magazine editor who is also a toy consultant for them. Ideal paid the $10^6 in September 1979.
• The Cube is not patentable in the USA because it was sold publicly for over a year in Hungary before patents were applied for. In England, however, it is "copyrighted" (equivalent to US patent + trademark) and Ideal has a legal monopoly.
• Ideal will run nationwide TV advertisements for the Cube beginning in a month or so. The campaign theme is rumored to involve Isaac Newton and to include an animated Cube which solves itself.
• Bela took out a second mortgage on his home to pay for the plastic molds for his Cube parts. He uses white plastic so that it will be possible to print the colors on via "pad printing", the same process whereby labels are put on some shampoo bottles. If all goes well LGI will start making printed-color Cubes within a month.
• Bela ordered 300 copies of the 4th edition of David Singmaster's booklet on the Cube in June 1980; Singmaster informed him in July that the 4th edition was out of print, but that he could have 300 of the 5th edition for the same price as soon as they come out. LGI has ~90 orders already pending, and while the remaining ~210 copies of the 5th edition last, Bela is willing to sell them for $4 each ... whenever they arrive.
• LGI wholesale prices start at orders for 12 Cubes, $6 each plus shipping. Individuals may want to consolidate their orders to save money.
• Rubik himself has said that he developed the Cube partly as an aid to teaching three-dimensional visualization in his students.
• Cube manufacturing is quite labor-intensive:
  • 4 minutes to tap in and glue the caps to cover the internal 6th face of edge and corner cubelets for the 20 pieces necessary to make one 3x3x3;
  • 1 minute to assemble with screws and springs five out of six swivels (central Cube faces) onto the middle cross;
  • 1 minute to assemble the pieces and screw in the last central face;
  • 4 minutes to perform final adjustment: apply silicone grease, torque up all the screws evenly, rotate the Cube every which way to test it out, and then tap in and glue the six central face caps over the screws; and finally
  • 6 minutes to apply the color squares to the faces.
• Bela can read while performing most of the final assembly, now that his hands have had several thousand Cubes' practice! The color application step will be eliminated if and when LGI begins to use pad printing for face coloring.
• About 4% of LGI's Cubes are rejected for mechanical reasons after initial assembly.
• LGI could work without gluing in internal faces of sub-cubes, but then about one Cube in every 20 would eventually fail. Bela won't accept that.
• Readers' Digest phoned Bela not long ago to confirm some data, presumably for a story on the Cube some day.

So what has happened in the 20+ years since that memorable visit? I haven't heard from Bela --- but given the flood of cheap imported cubes which hit the market in the early 1980's, I fear that the odds are not good that he made enough money to pay back his second mortgage ... nor to reimburse his family members for their work. Too bad; Mr. Szalai was a kind and thoughtful gentleman. (See ^zhurnal RubikCubism1 (16 March 2001))

Thursday, March 29, 2001 at 05:54:22 (EST) = 2001-03-29

TopicPersonalHistory - TopicProfiles

(correlates: RubikCubism1, FecklessPerson, NewtonianDogEarring, ...)

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