Purpose
This website was created to serve as an archive of methods and their presentations and changes over time. Method development has been poorly documented so this is an attempt to recover and preserve the important information. This is the result of many hours of studying various message boards, mailing lists, newsletters, books, conversing with others through private messages, and many years of my own experience and knowledge since joining the community in 2005. Method development has moved from being in books in the late 70s and early 80s to now being within internet discussions. So this library consists of book references and screenshots and links from the original online messages.
If you want to use anything from this website, feel free to do so. I only ask that you credit the site and me for the research that I have done (my name is James Straughan). If you want to contact me, send me an email at athefre@gmail.com. I go by the username Athefre in the various puzzle communities such as speedsolving.com and various Discord servers, so you can also contact me there. Some of the images may be more complicated, so please talk to me before using those.
Most of the information on the site comes from personal research. But there are some things that I wouldn't have been able to completely verify without the help of others. Georges Helm in particular was a great help. He was kind enough to look through the books that he owns and confirm my suspicions and provide me details. Ron van Bruchem also provided me some information about early method development. Others have been very willing to explain the origin of their own developments. Each person is credited on the site in the area in which they provided help.
The biggest historical discoveries that I have made that appear on this site
The origin of the F2L pair technique. Many thought that it was from Rene Schoof because he was credited in the September 1981 issue of Cubism For Fun. But there are several publications of the technique before then. The earliest known publication is by John Conway, David Benson, and David Seal in 1979 that included a complete table of every possible case. It also did PLL then OLL as the last layer method.
Cross and the Layer By Layer method wasn't first created by Singmaster as the community believes. Nor did Singmaster claim to have created them. He states in Notes on Rubik’s ‘Magic Cube’ that he had seen the method before and changed his method to his own version of that. The earliest known publication of the Layer By Layer method, starting with cross, is by Donald Taylor in 1978.
The standard notation isn’t all Singmaster. Only the U, D, L, R, F, B outer turn notation, the apostrophe for inverse, and the 2 for double turns are attributed to Singmaster. Rotations, wide turns, and others were created by other people.
The earliest known published Corners First and Edges First methods. One of the early Edges First methods was published by Zoltán Perjés, a relative of Ernő Rubik.
Pseudo slotting was created by Olly Hayden around 2001-2002. It was then called “Non-Matching Pairs”. CFOP users were aware of Hayden’s website and had been implementing it into their solves. The name of the technique was later changed to “Slant Pairing” by the community. Then changed once again to “Pseudo Slotting”.
An instance of early corner permutation by Lars Petrus in 1996.
Many Waterman-like methods before the Waterman method was created.
A Doug Li block isn’t F2L minus a first layer edge. It is a 2x2x3 minus the edge between the two corners.
It seems likely that some of the earliest methods, such as LBL and Edges First, were discovered and published in Hungary from 1977 to the end of 1978 before the cube made its way around the world. Currently the site has the earliest known publications for methods such as those, and they are all published outside of Hungary. It would be nice to track down any solutions that were published in Hungary before those in other countries who are currently credited with having first published such methods. These Hungarian publications could be in the form of books, booklets, magazines, newspaper articles, or maybe even provided in the box with the cube. If you know of any publications from those years, please contact me.
Origin of the project
Since I joined the community, I have always been interested in method development. From the very beginning I was trying out others' methods, developing my own methods, and updating the SpeedSolving.com wiki with the origins of methods. In May of 2020 I decided to start working on a timeline that covers the very beginning through now. That simple idea, and the subsequent research, turned into a 47 page Word document full of notes, links, and ideas. I decided that all of that content would be great to have in book form. I started structuring and writing the book and created this site just as a way to organize my resources for the book. I then realized that this website would be exactly what the community needed as a way to view the history of methods.
