Pentangle, later Pentangle Puzzles, was a British manufacturer and distributor of burr puzzles and other mechanical puzzles. It operated in the UK from 1971 until 2018. It was best known as the first company to distribute what became called "Rubik's Cube" outside Hungary.
Pentangle was set up as a family business by Ron Cook. It operated from premises in Over Wallop in rural Hampshire, England, originally with seven employees including Cook's wife, daughter and son. [1]
It was registered as a company in 1971, by Cook and his business partner James Dalgety, [1] [2] with the name Paradox Engineering Ltd. to avoid infringing the rights of the band Pentangle.[ citation needed ] It traded as Pentangle.
Pentangle's first product was a burr puzzle, the Woodchuck puzzle, whose object was to assemble 24 wooden pieces into an octahedral shape. It sold hundreds of thousands of these. [1] Pentangle eventually made a total of 314 different burr puzzles, and from 1979 made and sold the "Chinese Cross", a compendium of 42 pieces including all the pieces required to assemble any of these puzzles. [3]
Pentangle also made disentanglement puzzles, most famously the Double Treble Clef puzzle, [4] and sliding block [5] : 102–104, 127 and other [5] : 171, 176 puzzles.
In 1976, a wooden puzzle designed by Pentangle for the World Wildlife Fund to offer in its catalogue was expected to sell no more than 3000 copies. But within three weeks of publication 16,000 orders had been received. [1]
In December 1977 a Hungarian puzzle collector, Tibor Szentivanyi, told Dalgety about a new puzzle: Buvos Kocka, initially know in English as the Magic Cube. [2] In June 1979 Professor David Singmaster, who had first seen the cube at a mathematics conference in Helsinki in 1978, wrote an article in The Observer praising and recommending the cube. [2] [6] Pentangle was now able to sell 20,000 Magic Cubes a year at about £5 each. [7]
However, later in 1979 another branch of the Hungarian government revoked the deal with Pentangle, and did a deal with Ideal Toys in the US. [1] Ideal Toys agreed that Pentangle could sell what it now renamed as "Rubik's Cube" in the UK as a gift, but not as a toy. [2]
In 1982 public interest in Rubik's Cube, and in mechanical puzzles generally, plummeted. [2] Dalgety then left Pentangle. [1]
By 1986, Pentangle Puzzles had manufactured over 200 different mechanical puzzles. [2] In 1996 the Pentangle range included more than 40 lines, and the workshop in Over Wallop was producing 3000 puzzles a week, half of which were exported from the UK. [1] Cook developed a sideline in producing branded puzzles for large companies to give as Christmas gifts. One such puzzle, designed for ICI, was called "Excalibur": a sword-shaped letter-opener in a block of wood. The puzzle was, first to release the "sword" from the "stone", and then to decrypt the inscription on its blade so as to learn how to claim a prize. [1]
In 2000, the name of the company was changed to "Payday Games Limited". [8] In 2009 Cook sold the company to Timothy Dixon, [9] who changed its name to "Pentangle Puzzles Limited". [8] Pentangle Puzzles Limited ceased trading in 2018, and was liquidated in 2019. [9]
The Rubik's Cube is a 3D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the Magic Cube, the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Pentangle Puzzles in the UK in 1978, and then by Ideal Toy Corp in 1980 via businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer. The cube was released internationally in 1980 and became one of the most recognized icons in popular culture. It won the 1980 German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle. As of January 2024, around 500 million cubes had been sold worldwide, making it the world's bestselling puzzle game and bestselling toy. The Rubik's Cube was inducted into the US National Toy Hall of Fame in 2014.
A burr puzzle is an interlocking puzzle consisting of notched sticks, combined to make one three-dimensional, usually symmetrical unit. These puzzles are traditionally made of wood, but versions made of plastic or metal can also be found. Quality burr puzzles are usually precision-made for easy sliding and accurate fitting of the pieces. In recent years the definition of "burr" is expanding, as puzzle designers use this name for puzzles not necessarily of stick-based pieces.
Ernő Rubik is a Hungarian inventor, widely known for creating the Rubik's Cube (1974), Rubik's Magic, Rubik's Magic: Master Edition, and Rubik's Snake.
Rubik's Magic, like the Rubik's Cube, is a mechanical puzzle invented by Ernő Rubik and first manufactured by Matchbox in the mid-1980s.
Speedcubing, also referred to as speedsolving, is a competitive mind sport centered around the rapid solving of various combination puzzles. The most prominent puzzle in this category is the 3×3×3 puzzle, commonly known as the Rubik's Cube. Participants in this sport are called "speedcubers", who focus specifically on solving these puzzles at high speeds to get low clock times. The essential aspect of solving these puzzles typically involves executing a series of predefined algorithms in a particular sequence with eidetic prediction and finger tricks.
The Professor's Cube is a 5×5×5 version of the original Rubik's Cube. It has qualities in common with both the 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube and the 4×4×4 Rubik's Revenge, and solution strategies for both can be applied.
David Breyer Singmaster was an American-British mathematician who was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England. He had a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He was most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube. His Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" which he began compiling in 1979 provided the first mathematical analysis of the Cube as well as providing one of the first published solutions. The book contained his cube notation which allowed the recording of Rubik's Cube moves, and which quickly became the standard.
A sliding puzzle, sliding block puzzle, or sliding tile puzzle is a combination puzzle that challenges a player to slide pieces along certain routes to establish a certain end-configuration. The pieces to be moved may consist of simple shapes, or they may be imprinted with colours, patterns, sections of a larger picture, numbers, or letters.
The Rubik's Cube group represents the structure of the Rubik's Cube mechanical puzzle. Each element of the set corresponds to a cube move, which is the effect of any sequence of rotations of the cube's faces. With this representation, not only can any cube move be represented, but any position of the cube as well, by detailing the cube moves required to rotate the solved cube into that position. Indeed with the solved position as a starting point, there is a one-to-one correspondence between each of the legal positions of the Rubik's Cube and the elements of . The group operation is the composition of cube moves, corresponding to the result of performing one cube move after another.
Uwe Mèffert was a German puzzle designer and inventor. He manufactured and sold mechanical puzzles in the style of Rubik's Cube since the Cube craze of the 1980s. His first design was the Pyraminx – which he had developed before the original Rubik's Cube was invented. He created his own puzzle company and helped bring to market the Megaminx, Skewb, Skewb Diamond and many other puzzles.
Ideal Toy Company was an American toy company founded by Morris Michtom and his wife, Rose. During the post–World War II baby boom era, Ideal became the largest doll-making company in the United States. Their most popular dolls included Betsy Wetsy, Toni, Saucy Walker, Shirley Temple, Miss Revlon, Patti Playpal, Tammy, Thumbelina, Tiny Thumbelina, and Crissy. The company is also known for selling the Rubik's Cube.
God's algorithm is a notion originating in discussions of ways to solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle, but which can also be applied to other combinatorial puzzles and mathematical games. It refers to any algorithm which produces a solution having the fewest possible moves. The allusion to the deity is based on the notion that an omniscient being would know an optimal step from any given configuration.
Nicolas Hammond is a British Rubik's Cube expert and businessman. He has lived in the US since 1986. He made the world's first Internet banking transaction.
A combination puzzle, also known as a sequential move puzzle, is a puzzle which consists of a set of pieces which can be manipulated into different combinations by a group of operations. Many such puzzles are mechanical puzzles of polyhedral shape, consisting of multiple layers of pieces along each axis which can rotate independently of each other. Collectively known as twisty puzzles, the archetype of this kind of puzzle is the Rubik's Cube. Each rotating side is usually marked with different colours, intended to be scrambled, then solved by a sequence of moves that sort the facets by colour. Generally, combination puzzles also include mathematically defined examples that have not been, or are impossible to, physically construct.
The Rubik's Triamid is a mechanical puzzle invented by Ernő Rubik and released in 1990 by Matchbox. The puzzle was patented in Hungary in 1991. It was re-released in 2017 at the American International Toy Fair by Winning Moves.
The superflip or 12-flip is a special configuration on a Rubik's Cube, in which all the edge and corner pieces are in the correct permutation, and the eight corners are correctly oriented, but all twelve edges are oriented incorrectly ("flipped").
The Layer by Layer method, also known as the beginners' method, is a method of solving the 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube. Many beginners' methods use this approach, and it also forms the basis of the CFOP speedcubing technique.
The Nine-Colour Cube is a cubic twisty puzzle. It was invented in 2005 by Milan Vodicka and mass-produced by Meffert's seven years later. Mechanically, the puzzle is identical to the Rubik's Cube; however, unlike the 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube, which only has 6 different colours, the Nine-Colour Cube has 9 colours, with the individual pieces having one colour each.
Larry D. Nichols, born 1939 in the United States, is a puzzle designer. He grew up in Xenia, Ohio, and studied chemistry at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, before moving to Massachusetts to attend Harvard Graduate School. He is best known for the invention of mechanical puzzles including 'The Nichols Cube Puzzle' (1972), patent US3655201. He has lived with his wife Karen in Arlington, Massachusetts since 1959.
