"Lego Celebrates 50 Years!"

Today, LEGO turned fifty years old. And these days, the plastic toy building bricks are everywhere, with thousands of sets covering all sorts of themes -- from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Pirates.

Every year, about 19 billion LEGO bricks are produced. That translates to 2.16 million LEGO pieces molded every hour, or 36,000 every minute! More than 400 million people around the world have played with LEGOs bricks. And if all the bricks sold in one year were collected and put together, they would circle the earth five times... or connect the Earth and the moon ten times over.

The LEGO company got it's start back in 1932 when Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter, almost went bankrupt. During a depression, he had lost so much carpentry business that he started making wooden toys and selling them from his workshop. Two years later, he named his company LEGO (from Danish words "leg godt" meaning "play well".)

LEGO's first product was a wooden toy duck.

Ole Kirk didn’t invent LEGO bricks, though. He was inspired by the earlier "Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Brick" patented by British inventor Hilary Fisher Page. In 1947, LEGO released their first bricks, and many years later, they bought the rights to the Kiddicraft block as well.

In 1958, the modern-day brick design was developed, and bricks from that year are still compatible with the bricks of today.

The first mini-figures (or minifigs) were released in 1978 for the Town, Space, and Castle playsets. When they were first created, LEGO decided their (always happy) faces should have only one color: yellow. And they never had any sex or race... or movable arms or legs for that matter.

In the 1980's, with the arrival of the LEGO Pirates set, new facial features (evil/good/happy/grumpy) were released. And in 2003, the company finally released different skin colors.

Today, LEGO features hundreds of building elements that be combined in endless combinations. In my opinion, they've truely become the most creative toy ever manufactured.

Learn more about LEGO.

"At 50, Lego still going strong despite high-tech toy world"

-Jon
posted by Jon at 9:48 PM  I   I  0 comments