Lego Products
It's hard to imagine childhood without Lego products. Those colorful little plastic interlocking bricks are everywhere. And they seem to have been around forever. But that's not actually the case.
Lego products came about almost by accident and certainly without the notion of eventually taking the world of toys by storm. And the carpenter who first made them absolutely detested the idea of manufacturing them from plastic molds instead of carving them from wood. The plastic version won out, though, and the rest is history.
But here's a brief recap of the history of Lego products themselves:
Ole Kirk Christiansen first started crafting wooden toys in his carpentry workshop in Billund, Denmark, in 1932. Two years later, the word "Lego" came along. There are some variations as to the original intention of using that particular word but they all seem rather plausible.
If Lego products got their name, as some say, from the Danish term, "leg godt," it could mean "play well." It could also mean "I put together" or "I assemble," with a little influence from Latin. Some people take the translation from Latin a step or two further and claim the word can mean "I collect; I gather; I learn." No Lego products fan would argue that scenario. There's even the possibility of a Greek translation that says "lego" can mean "gather, pick up," again quite appropriate for the Lego products we all know and love. But hate to clean up after.
Plastic Lego products made their appearance in 1940 although the interlocking bricks we all know today didn't make an appearance until 1949, when they were known as Automatic Binding Bricks. They were inspired by a Kiddicraft design of self-locking bricks released in the United Kingdom in 1947.
The original Lego products that we all know today were first made from cellulose acetate but today they're made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS for short. The materials that go into the manufacture of all Lego products is very important as the company's motto is "Only the best is good enough," so only the best is allowed.
It's a little ironic to think about the drive for excellence the Lego Group put into its first line of plastic Lego products. They were met with dismal failure. Seems the general public wasn't amused. They wanted real toys. The kind made out of wood.
The plastic Lego products remained in production, however, although not enjoying a stellar sales record. Not until an innovative new strategy came about in 1954.
The elder Christiansen's son, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, serving as junior managing director for the Lego Group, which had become the official company name, was inspired by a conversation he had with a buyer who suggested expanding the Lego products line from individual toys into entire toy systems.
The Lego products quickly evolved from individual toys into entire toy systems. The design used today made its debut appearance in 1958 but wasn't perfected until five years later, in 1963. The 1958 version was patented, however, and can still be used with the bricks manufactured today.
Without considering all the Lego products manufactured each year, have you ever wondered how many of just the bricks are made each year? It's mind boggling.
Each year the Lego Group manufactures 20 billion bricks. They crank 'em out at a rate of 600 per second. With numbers like that rolling off the assembly lines, someone could take all the Lego bricks ever made, divide them up equally among each and every person on the planet, assuming six billion people on the planet, and we'd each get 62 Lego bricks to call our very own.
And when they make all those amazing Lego products, only 1% of the plastic waste isn't recycled.
