Lego
Automatic Binding Bricks
Monday, July 28, 1958
Lego is, as of 2022, the world’s biggest toy company. The company was started in 1934, by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund, Denmark. Lego first began with wooden toys.
Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891-1958)
Lego began making ‘Automatic Binding Bricks’ from plastic in 1947 after receiving samples of the Kiddicraft plastic self-locking bricks that had been invented by Hilary “Harry” Fisher Page.
The Kiddicraft original 1940s products:
The Lego patent for the modern ABS Lego brick (Lego as we know it) was filed on July 28, 1958, shortly after Christiansen’s death in March of that year, by his son, Godtfred. The patent was granted on October 24, 1961.
Lego has produced, as of 2022, an estimated 650-800 billion bricks!
Lego maintains that they asked permission from Kiddicraft in the late 1950s to make their own version of the bricks and say that Kiddicraft had no objection, but never established that legally. Lego finally bought the residual rights to the Kiddicraft patent in 1981, and in an out-of-court settlement, paid £45,000 to Kiddicraft.
There are 10 Lego amusement parks: Denmark, England, Germany, California, Florida, Malaysia, Dubai, Japan, Korea, and New York.
A Lego model of Trafalgar Square at Legoland in Windsor, England:
There is a life-size Lego Star Wars X-Wing fighter, which is a 23 ton, 5.3 million brick creation with a 44 feet wingspan!
The Lego motto from 1936 is still in use today: "only the best is good enough" (Danish: det bedste er ikke for godt, literally "the best isn't excessively good")