Lego is a Danish multinational line of
construction toys manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company
based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of
colourful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears,
minifigures and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected
in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even
working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the
pieces used to make other objects.
Lego
began manufacturing interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Since then a global Lego
subculture has developed, supporting movies, games, competitions, and six
themed amusement parks. As of 2013, around 560 billion Lego parts had been
produced.
History
The
Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (born 7 April 1891),
a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In
1934, his company came to be called "Lego", from the Danish phrase leg
godt, which means "play well". It expanded to producing plastic
toys in 1947. In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early
version of the now famous interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic
Binding Bricks". These bricks were based in part on the Kiddicraft
Self-Locking Bricks, which were patented in the United Kingdom in 1939 and then
there released in 1947. Lego modified the design of the Kiddicraft brick after
examining a sample given to it by the British supplier of an injection-molding
machine that the company had purchased. The bricks, originally manufactured
from cellulose acetate, were a development of traditional stackable wooden
blocks that locked together by means of several round studs on top and a hollow
rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they
required extraordinary effort to be separated.
The
Lego Group's motto is det bedste er ikke for godt which means roughly
"only the best is the best" (more literally "the best is never
too good"). This motto was created by Ole Kirk to encourage his employees
never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly. The motto is still
used within the company today. By 1951 plastic toys accounted for half of the
Lego Company’s output, although Danish trade magazine Legetøjs-Tidende
("Toy-Times"), visiting the Lego factory in Billund in the early
1950s, felt that plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden
toys. Although a common sentiment, Lego toys seem to have become a significant
exception to the dislike of plastic in children's toys, due in part to the high
standards set by Ole Kirk.
By
1954, Christiansen's son, Godtfred, had become the junior managing director of
the Lego Group. It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that led to the
idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the immense potential in Lego bricks to
become a system for creative play, but the bricks still had some problems from
a technical standpoint: their locking ability was limited and they were not
very versatile. In 1958, the modern brick design was developed, and it took
another five years to find the right material for it, ABS (acrylonitrile
butadiene styrene) polymer. The modern Lego brick was patented on 28 January
1958, and bricks from that year are still compatible with current bricks.
In
1978, Lego produced the first minifigures, which have since become a staple in
most sets. New elements are often released along with new sets. There are also
Lego sets designed to appeal to young girls such as the Belville and Clikits
lines which consist of small interlocking parts that are meant to encourage
creativity and arts and crafts, much like regular Lego bricks. Belville and
Clikit pieces can interlock with regular Lego bricks as decorative elements.
Lego
Fabuland ran from 1979 to 1989. The more advanced Lego Technic was launched in
1977. Lego Primo is a line of blocks by the Lego Group for very young children
that ran between 2004 and 2006. In 1995 Lego Baby was launched for babies.
In
May 2011, Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134 brought 13 Lego kits to the
International Space Station, where astronauts will build models and see how
they react in microgravity, as part of the Lego Bricks in Space program. The
results will be shared with schools as part of an educational project.
