One Man’s Brick is Another Man’s Treasure

Hello, I hope you are all doing well. Today I would like to do a spotlight in history on most likely one of the best-known toys in history. This specific toy has come to prominence within recent years, and has a very interesting history. While this post may be brief, the joy and time spent with the simple Lego is not.

The Lego or legos were created in a carpenter’s shop in Bilund, Denmark in 1932. Essentially at first, the toy was designed a simple block used to be stacked creating whatever the user wanted. In a way, it was the Danish counterpart of the Lincoln Log. The name “Lego” derives from the Danish phrase, “leg godt” which means “play well”. As one can assume, lego is a much more simple to say because the average American or European is not fluent with Danish. Denmark was a mass producer of wooden children toys up until the late 1930s and 1940s where their neighbor, Germany, made a rash business move by invading the country. Most workshops were burnt down which crippled the Danish wooden toy business. Due to this unfortunate invasion, many wooden toy makers post-world war two had to look to other methods of what to use.

While wooden toys were great, the majority of toy-makers world wide were switching to more durable materials such as metals or even plastics. Plastics were a new idea, but they were known to be durable and easier to handle. Ole Kirk Christiansen who founded the manufacturing group, The Lego Group, decided that plastic would be great for his idea of an interlocking plastic brick toy. Essentially this system is that one brick can be locked into place by combining it with another brick. This is a system that is still held in high regards by every lego engineer or user. A block from this method created back in the 1950s can still be used on a block from 2020. When rising to prominence in the 1930s, the motto of The Lego Group came to be, “Only the best is good enough.” Twenty years after a wooden block to a plastic interlocking system is definitely good enough, and even better. In the late 1950s, Christiansen’s son became a junior partner and established the lego brick as a toy.

Aside from the short history of this interlocking brick, people came at the lego with full force. My grandparents had legos, my parents had legos, I currently still have legos as an adult, and I am pretty darn sure that my kids will have legos. While the designs can be as simple as moving car to as complex as the Star Wars Death Star, there is always something that could be made. I remember going to Legoland in California as a kid. My mom bought a random bag of legos with no instructions and over time she made a bifold plane. There is no limit to how far one’s imagination can go with a simple brick system.

While this was a short post, if you have read this and would like to comment, tell me how the lego has impacted your life!