Jan 28, 2008

50 Years of Lego

Today it's the 50'th anniversary of an event which has influenced most of us, mostly during our childhood. Lego turns 50!

"It was at 1:58 p.m. on January 28, 1958, that then-Lego head Godtfred Kirk Christiansen filed a patent for the iconic plastic brick with its stud and hole design. Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion Lego elements, or 62 bricks for every person on the planet. And if stacked on top of one another, the pieces would form 10 towers reaching all the way from the Earth to the Moon.

But Lego's legacy lies less in numbers than in its creative influence. The colorful bricks have littered playroom floors for generations of families. But they have also spurred ingenuity among children that few toys can claim before and since. The company has always emphasized the importance of free-form play, and Lego's popularity can be attributed to the amount of imagination children use to build with the bricks.

The Lego company was founded in 1932 by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund who had a sideline in wooden toys. He named the company after an amalgamation of the Danish phrase 'leg godt', which means "play well"." ....

"The group itself is only planning low-key celebrations of the patent anniversary: a special-edition of its 1950s-style Town Plan set with three gold bricks, and a worldwide building contest with a grand final at Legoland Billund. And for most Google users Monday — itself a website which keeps building and growing in size — the homepage spelling of the company name in Lego blocks will come across as just another of the web giant's quirks. But for the millions who grew up on the brick — and the millions more still fitting them together — that lunchtime visit to the patent's office proved priceless."

Read more about Lego's history here!

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