Rubik's Cube fever in 1981 -- one man's swift solution | This Week in History

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Rubik's Cube fever was sweeping the nation in the summer of 1981 when Eyewitness News reporter Josh Howell decided to take the temperature of the pop-culture phenomenon.

He interviewed a Stanford University chemist, James G. Nourse, who became so adept at solving the Rubik's Cube, he wrote a book about it, "The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube." To him, the cube was composed of moving atoms, making it easy to solve, at least for a chemist who knows a thing or two about molecules and math.

Clearly, not everyone felt the same.

Watch Josh Howell's original report in the video player, above.

A child at a book-store appearance by Nourse told Howell he'd spent five to six months trying to crack the cube code with nothing to show for it.

There are about 43 quintillion solutions to a Rubik's Cube, Nourse told Eyewitness News. That's a big number. His book may not have made that much money, but it was no slouch either. It sold 6,680,000 copies to become the best-selling book of 1981 and the fastest seller at the time for Bantam Books, the publisher.

For Nourse, it paid to be a cubist with good timing. By 1982, Rubik's Cube fever was cooling, but the creation of Erno Rubik never entirely vanished, and remains a colorful symbol of American life in the 1980s.