The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by a man named Erno Rubik.
The cube was invented to help Rubik teach his students about spacial relationships.
Here is an image of the original design for the Rubik's Cube:


http://rubiks.com/uploads/general_content/original-cube.png

After the cube was created, Rubik spent an entire month creating the solutions for the cube.
Rubik then realized how many people would like to use the cube as a toy.
He first brought them to production in Hungary where they were called "Magic Cubes."
The cubes then began to be sold worldwide and eventually became the world's best selling toy.

Cool facts about the cube! There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways to scramble a cube! If  there was one cube for every single permutation possible, you could cover the earth in 273 layers of Rubik's Cubes. If you were to turn a Rubik's Cube once every second, it would take you 1,400 trillion years to cycle through every permutation. (Not counting unsolvable states) Counting unsolvable states, this number grows to more than 12 times as big. There have been over 350 million cubes sold to date. Approximately 1 in 7 people have played with a Rubik's Cube. Every permutation can be solved in 20 moves or less. The world record time for the standard Rubik's Cube is 5.55 seconds.