Lego (/ˈlɛɡoʊ/LEG-oh, Danish:[ˈle̝ːko];[1] stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. Lego consists of variously coloured interlocking plastic bricks made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) that accompany an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. Its pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Assembled Lego models can be taken apart, and their pieces can be reused to create new constructions.[2][3]
The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Moulding is done in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico, and China. Brick decorations and packaging are done at plants in the former three countries and in the Czech Republic. Annual production of the bricks averages approximately 36 billion, or about 1140 elements per second. One of Europe's biggest companies, Lego is the largest toy manufacturer in the world by sales.[4][5] As of July 2015[update], 600 billion Lego parts had been produced.[6]Films, games competitions, and eight Legolandamusement parks have been developed under the brand.
Hilary Fisher Page's Interlocking Building Cubes by Kiddicraft, 1939
The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932.[7][8] In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", derived from the Danish phrase leg godt[lɑjˀˈkʌt],[9][10] which means "play well".[11] In 1947, Lego expanded to begin producing plastic toys.[12] In 1949 the business began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". These bricks were based on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, invented by Hilary Page in 1939 and patented in the United Kingdom in 1940[13] before being displayed at the 1947 Earl's Court Toy Fair.[14] Lego had received a sample of the Kiddicraft bricks from the supplier of an injection-molding machine that it purchased.[15][16][17][18] The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate,[19] were a development of the traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time.[12]
Boy from the UK playing with Lego in 1957. First sold in Denmark, the company expanded its sales across Europe in the 1950s, before expanding outside the continent from the 1960s.The home factory at Højmarksvej, Billund, Denmark (pictured in 1973)
The Lego Group's motto, "only the best is good enough"[20] (Danish: det bedste er ikke for godt, literally "the best isn't excessively good") was created in 1936.[8] Christiansen created the motto, still used today, to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly.[8] By 1951, plastic toys accounted for half of the company's output, even though the Danish trade magazine Legetøjs-Tidende ("Toy Times"), visiting the Lego factory in Billund in the early 1950s, wrote that plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys.[21] Although a common sentiment, Lego toys seem to have become a significant exception to the dislike of plastic in children's toys, due in part to the high standards set by Ole Kirk.[22]
By 1954, Christiansen's son, Godtfred, had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group.[21] It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that led to the idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the immense potential in Lego bricks to become a system for creative play, but the bricks still had some problems from a technical standpoint: Their locking ability was still limited, and they were not yet versatile.[2] In 1958, the modern brick design was developed; ABS subsequently replaced cellulose acetate as the manufacturing material five years later.[19][23][24] A patent application for the modern Lego brick design was filed in Denmark on 28 January 1958 and in various other countries in the subsequent few years.[25][26]
Lego bricksTwo Lego Duplo bricks with a standard brick for comparison
The Lego Group's Duplo product line was introduced in 1969 and is a range of blocks whose lengths measure twice the width, height, and depth of standard Lego blocks and are aimed towards younger children.[21][27] In 1978, Lego produced the first minifigures, which have since become a staple in most sets.[28]
In May 2011, Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134 brought 13 Lego kits to the International Space Station, where astronauts built models to see how they would react in microgravity, as a part of the Lego Bricks in Space program.[29][30] In May 2013, the largest model ever created, made of over 5 million bricks, was displayed in New York City; a one-to-one scale model of a Star WarsX-wing fighter.[31] Other record breakers include a 34-metre (112 ft) tower[32] and a 4 km (2.5 mi) railway.[33][34]
In February 2015, marketing consulting company Brand Finance ranked Lego as the "world's most powerful brand", overtaking Ferrari.[35][36]
Lego bricks have acquired a reputation for causing extreme pain when stepped on.[37]
Design
Lego pieces of all varieties constitute a universal system. Despite variations in the design and the purposes of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made presently, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers. Six bricks of 2 × 4 studs[38] can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.[39]
Each piece must be manufactured to an exacting degree of precision. When two pieces are engaged, they must fit firmly, yet be easily disassembled. The machines that manufacture Lego bricks have tolerances as small as 10 micrometres.[40]
Dimensions of some standard Lego bricks and plates[41][42]
Primary concept and development work for the toy takes place at the Billund headquarters, where the company employs approximately 120 designers. The company also has smaller design offices in the UK, Spain, Germany, and Japan which are tasked with developing products aimed specifically at their respective national markets. The average development period for a new product is around twelve months, split into three stages. The first is to identify market trends and developments, including contact by the designers directly with the market; some are stationed in toy shops close to holidays, while others interview children. The second stage is the design and development of the product based on the results of the first stage. As of September 2008[update] the design teams use 3D modelling software to generate CAD drawings from initial design sketches. The designs are then prototyped using an in-house stereolithography machine. These prototypes are presented to the entire project team for comment and testing by parents and children during the "validation" process. Designs may then be altered in accordance with the results from the focus groups. Virtual models of completed Lego products are built concurrently with the writing of the user instructions. Completed CAD models are also used in the wider organisation for marketing and packaging.[43]
Lego Digital Designer is an official piece of Lego software for Mac OS X and Windows which allows users to create their own digital Lego designs.[44] The program once allowed customers to order custom designs[45] with a service to ship physical models from Digital Designer to consumers; the service ended in 2012.[46]
Since 1963, Lego pieces have been manufactured from ABS plastic.[19][40] As of September 2008[update], Lego engineers use the NXCAD/CAM/CAEPLM software suite to model the elements. The software allows the parts to be optimised by way of mould flow and stress analysis. Prototype moulds are sometimes built before the design is committed to mass production. The ABS plastic is heated to 232 °C (450 °F) until it reaches a dough-like consistency. It is then injected into the moulds using forces of between 25 and 150 tonnes and takes approximately 15 seconds to cool. The moulds are permitted a tolerance of up to twenty micrometres to ensure the bricks remain connected.[43] Human inspectors check the output of the moulds to eliminate significant variations in colour or thickness. According to the Lego Group, about eighteen bricks out of every million fail to meet the standard required.[47]
Lego factories recycle all but about 1 percent of their plastic waste from the manufacturing process. If the plastic cannot be re-used in Lego bricks, it is processed and sold on to industries that can make use of it.[48][49] Lego, in 2018, set a self-imposed 2030 deadline to find a more eco-friendly alternative to the ABS plastic.[50]
Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at several locations around the world. Moulding is done in Billund, Denmark; Nyíregyháza, Hungary; Monterrey, Mexico; and most recently in Jiaxing, China. Brick decorations and packaging are done at plants in the former three countries and in Kladno in the Czech Republic. The Lego Group estimates that in five decades it has produced 400 billion Lego blocks.[51] Annual production of the bricks averages approximately 36 billion, or about 1140 elements per second. According to an article in BusinessWeek in 2006, Lego could also be considered the world's number-one tyre manufacturer; the factory produces about 306 million small rubber tyres a year.[52] The claim was reiterated in 2012.[53]
In December 2012, the BBC's More or Less radio program asked the Open University's engineering department to determine "how many Lego bricks, stacked one on top of the other, it would take for the weight to destroy the bottom brick?"[54] Using a hydraulic testing machine, members of the department determined the average maximum force a 2×2 Lego brick can stand is 4,240 newtons. Since an average 2×2 Lego brick has a mass of 1.152 grams (0.0406 oz), according to their calculations it would take a stack of 375,000 bricks to cause the bottom brick to collapse, which represents a stack 3,591 metres (11,781 ft) in height.[54]
Private tests have shown several thousand assembly-disassembly cycles before the bricks begin to wear out,[55] although Lego tests show fewer cycles.[56]
In 2018, Lego announced that it will be using bio-derived polyethylene to make its botanical elements (parts such as leaves, bushes and trees).[57]The New York Times reported the company's footprint that year was "about a million tons of carbon dioxide each year" and that it was investing about 1 billion kroner and hiring 100 people to work on changes. The paper reported that Lego's researchers "have already experimented with around 200 alternatives."[58] In 2020, Lego announced that it would cease packaging its products in single-use plastic bags and would instead be using recyclable paper bags.[59][60] In 2021, the company said it would aim to produce its bricks without using crude oil, by using recycled polyethylene terephthalate bottles, but in 2023 it reversed this decision, having found that this did not reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.[61]
Since the 1950s, the Lego Group has released thousands of sets with a variety of themes, including space, pirates, trains, (European) castle, dinosaurs, undersea exploration, and wild west, as well as wholly original themes like Bionicle and Hero Factory. Some of the classic themes that continue to the present day include Lego City (a line of sets depicting city life introduced in 1973) and Lego Technic (a line aimed at emulating complex machinery, introduced in 1977).[62]
Over the years, the company has licensed themes from numerous cartoon and film franchises and some from video games. These include Batman, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel, and Minecraft. Although some of these themes, Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones, had highly successful sales, the company expressed in 2015 a desire to rely more upon their own characters and classic themes and less upon such licensed themes.[63] Some sets include references to other themes such as a Bionicle mask in one of the Harry Potter sets.[64] Discontinued sets may become a collectable and command value on the black market.[65]
One of the largest commercially produced Lego sets was a minifigure-scaled edition of the Star WarsMillennium Falcon. Designed by Jens Kronvold Fredericksen, it was released in 2007 and contained 5,195 pieces. It was surpassed by a 5,922-piece Taj Mahal. A redesigned Millennium Falcon retook the top spot in 2017 with 7,541 pieces.[67] Since then, the Millennium Falcon has been superseded by the Lego Art World Map at 11,695 pieces, the Lego Titanic at 9,090 pieces, and the Lego Architect Colosseum at 9,036 pieces.[68]
In 2022, Lego introduced its Eiffel Tower. The set consists of 10,000 parts and reaches a height of 149 cm (60 in), which makes it the tallest set and tower but the second in number of parts after the World Map.[69]
The company also initiated a robotics line of toys called 'Mindstorms' in 1999, and has continued to expand and update this range ever since. The roots of the product originate from a programmable brick developed at the MIT Media Lab, and the name is taken from a paper by Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and educator who developed the educational theory of constructionism, and whose research was at times funded by the Lego Group.[70]
The programmable Lego brick which is at the heart of these robotics sets has undergone several updates and redesigns, with the latest being called the 'EV3' brick, being sold under the name of Lego Mindstorms EV3. The set includes sensors that detect touch, light, sound and ultrasonic waves, with several others being sold separately, including an RFID reader.[71]
The intelligent brick can be programmed using official software available for Windows and Mac computers, and is downloaded onto the brick via Bluetooth or a USB cable. There are also several unofficial programs and compatible programming languages that have been made to work with the brick, and many books have been written to support this community.[71]
There are several robotics competitions which use the Lego robotics sets. The earliest is Botball, a national U.S. middle- and high-school competition stemming from the MIT 6.270 Lego robotics tournament. Other Lego robotics competitions include FIRST LEGO League Discover for children ages 4–6, FIRST LEGO League Explore for students ages 6–9 and FIRST Lego League Challenge for students ages 9–16 (age 9–14 in the United States, Canada, and Mexico). These programs offer real-world engineering challenges to participants. FIRST LEGO League Challenge uses LEGO-based robots to complete tasks, FIRST LEGO League Explore participants build models out of Lego elements, and FIRST LEGO League Discover participants use Duplo. In its 2019–2020 season, there were 38,609 FIRST LEGO League Challenge teams and 21,703 FIRST LEGO League Explore teams around the world. The international RoboCup Juniorfootball competition involves extensive use of Lego Mindstorms equipment which is often pushed to its extreme limits.[72]
The capabilities of the Mindstorms range have now been harnessed for use in Iko Creative Prosthetic System, a prosthetic limbs system designed for children. Designs for these Lego prosthetics allow everything from mechanical diggers to laser-firing spaceships to be screwed on to the end of a child's limb. Iko is the work of the Chicago-based Colombian designer Carlos Arturo Torres, and is a modular system that allows children to customise their own prosthetics with the ease of clicking together plastic bricks. Designed with Lego's Future Lab, the Danish toy company's experimental research department, and Cirec, a Colombian foundation for physical rehabilitation, the modular prosthetic incorporates myoelectric sensors that register the activity of the muscle in the stump and send a signal to control movement in the attachment. A processing unit in the body of the prosthetic contains an engine compatible with Lego Mindstorms, the company's robotics line, which lets the wearer build an extensive range of customised, programmable limbs.[73][74]
Lego's popularity is demonstrated by its wide representation and usage in many cultural works, including books, films, and art. It has even been used in the classroom as a teaching tool.[75] In the US, Lego Education North America is a joint venture between Pitsco, Inc. and the educational division of the Lego Group.[76]
"Lego" is commonly used as a mass noun ("some Lego") or, in American English, as a countable noun with plural "Legos", to refer to the bricks themselves,[78] but as is common for trademarks, Lego group insists on the name being used as an adjective when referring to a product (as in "LEGO bricks").[79]
The last significant patent for Lego bricks expired in 1978.[25][80] Since then, competitors have produced blocks of similar dimensions and design that can be connected with Lego bricks.[80] In 2002, Lego sued the CoCo Toy Company in Beijing for copyright infringement over its "Coko bricks" product. CoCo was ordered to cease manufacture of the products, publish a formal apology and pay damages.[81] Lego sued the English company Best-Lock Construction Toys in German courts in 2004[82] and 2009;[83] the Federal Patent Court of Germany denied Lego trademark protection for the shape of its bricks for the latter case.[84] In 2005, the Lego Company sued Canadian company Ritvik Holdings Inc., which makes Mega Bloks, for trademark violation. However, the Supreme Court of Canadaupheld Ritvik Holdings Inc.'s rights to sell its product.[85] In 2010, the European Court of Justice ruled that the eight-peg design of the original Lego brick "merely performs a technical function [and] cannot be registered as a trademark."[86]
In 2020 and 2021, Lego sent cease and desist letters to small toy retailers and popular YouTubers in Germany. In 2021, a shipment of bricks delivered by clone producer Qman was blocked from passing through German customs due to concerns over the potential infringement of Lego's intellectual property. The recipient toy retailer initiated an appeal for donations to import containers of Lego clones from China to Germany and donate them to children's homes, which received more than €350,000 within a couple of weeks.[87][88][89]
Related services
Official website
First launched in 1996, the Lego website has developed over the years, and provides many extra services beyond an online store and a product catalogue. There are also moderated message boards that were founded in 2001.[90] The site also includes instruction booklets for all Lego sets dating back to 2002.[91]
The Lego website features a social media app named Lego Life,[92][93] which is designed for children under 13 years of age. The app is available as a free download and only features Lego-related content. It was designed to be a social network for children to be inspired, create and share their Lego builds, photos and videos with a like-minded community, whilst also providing Lego content in the form of product advertising, images, videos, campaigns and competitions. The app incorporates a variety of child safety features to provide a safe digital environment for children, including the protection of personal information and the heavy moderation of all uploaded user-generated content and communication.[94][95]
My Lego Network was a social networking site that involved items, blueprints, ranks, badges which were earned for completing certain tasks, trading and trophies called masterpieces which allowed users to progress to go to the next rank. The website had a built-in inbox which allowed users to send pre-written messages to one another. The Lego Network included automated non-player characters within called "Networkers", who were able to do things which normal users could not do, sending custom messages, and selling masterpieces and blueprints. The site also had modules which were set up on the user's page that gave the user items, or that displayed picture compositions. My Lego network closed in 2015.
Before My Lego Network, there were Lego Club Pages, which essentially held the same purpose, although the design lacked complex interaction.[96]
A Lego store in Toronto, CanadaThe world's largest Lego store in Leicester Square, London
The first Lego store to open anywhere in the world was in Sydney, Australia, in 1984. Located in the Birkenhead Point Outlet Centre it was not only the first dedicated Lego retail outlet, but it also had displays including many iconic Australian items such as the Holden FJ, Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the Sydney Opera House as well as buildings from Amsterdam, dinosaurs and an English Village. Known as The LEGO® Centre, Birkenhead Point, the store closed in the early 1990s.[103]
As of March 2024[update], Lego operates 1031 retail shops, called Lego Stores, globally.[104] The world's largest Lego store is located in Leicester Square, London.[105] The U.S. stores include the Downtown Disney shopping complexes at Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts as well as in Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. The opening of each new store is celebrated with a weekend-long event in which a Master Model Builder creates, with the help of volunteers—a larger-than-life Lego statue, which is then displayed at the new store for several weeks.[106]
Since around 2000, the Lego Group has been promoting "Lego Serious Play", a form of business consultancy fostering creative thinking, in which team members build metaphors of their organizational identities and experiences using Lego bricks. Participants work through imaginary scenarios using visual three-dimensional Lego constructions, imaginatively exploring possibilities in a serious form of play.[107]
Lego Games launched in 2009, was a series of Lego-themed board games designed by Cephas Howard and Reiner Knizia[111][112] in which the players usually build the playing board out of Lego bricks and then play with Lego-style players. Examples of the games include "Minotaurus", in which players roll dice to move characters within a brick-build labyrinth, "Creationary", in which players must build something which appears on a card, or "Ramses Pyramid", in which players collect gems and climb up a customizable pyramid. Like many board games, the games use dice. In Lego Games, the dice are Lego, with Lego squares with symbols on Lego studs on the dice, surrounded by rubber. The games vary from simple to complex; some are similar to "traditional" board games, while others are completely different.[113]
The Lego Movie, a feature film based on Lego toys, was released by Warner Bros. in February 2014.[122] It featured Chris Pratt in the lead role, with substantial supporting characters voiced by Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Alison Brie, Will Ferrell and Nick Offerman.[123] A contest was held for contestants to submit designs for vehicles to be used in the film.[124] After the release of The Lego Movie, independent Canadian toy retailers reported issues with shortages of Lego products and cited cancellations of Lego pre-orders without warning[125] as a motive to stock compatible, rival products.[126]
A spin-off of The Lego Movie, entitled The Lego Batman Movie, directed by Chris McKay was released in the US in February 2017.[127] A sequel to The Lego Batman Movie was planned and later cancelled.[128]
In February 2019, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part was released, which was a direct sequel to the original film and starred Chris Pratt in the lead role.[131]
Books and magazines
Lego has an ongoing deal with British multinational publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK), who have produced a series of illustrated hardback books looking at different aspects of the construction toy. The first was The Ultimate Lego Book, published in 1999. In 2009, the same publisher produced The LEGO Book, which was sold within a slipcase along with Standing Small: A celebration of 30 years of the LEGO minifigure, a smaller book focused on the minifigure. In 2012, a revised edition was published. Also in 2009, DK also published books on Lego Star Wars and a range of Lego-based sticker books.[132]
Although no longer being published in the United States by Scholastic, books covering events in the Bionicle storyline are written by Greg Farshtey. They are still being published in Europe by AMEET. Bionicle comics, also written by Farshtey, are compiled into graphic novels and were released by Papercutz. This series ended in 2009, after nine years.[133]
There is also the Lego Club and Brickmaster magazine, the latter discontinued in 2011.[134] The Lego Life Magazine was released in 2017 and serves as a replacement for the Lego Club Magazine.[135]
Clothing
Kabooki, a Danish company founded in 1993, produces children's clothes branded as "Lego Wear" under licence from the Lego Group.[136] In 2020, Lego announced collaborations with Adidas and Levi's.[137] In 2021, Lego announced collaborations with Justhype and Adidas to produce apparel inspired by the Lego Ninjago theme.[138][139] In May 2021, Lego announced collaborations with Adidas to produce products inspired by the Lego Vidiyo theme.[140]
References
^Brink, Lars; Lund, Jørn; Heger, Steffen; Jørgensen, J. Normann (1991). Den Store Danske Udtaleordbog. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. p. 845. ISBN87-16-06649-9.
^"Lego: the brick behemoth that wants to be as big as Disney". Financial Times. Retrieved 16 October 2023. Such innovations have propelled the family-owned toymaker to become one of Europe's biggest corporate success stories.. Lego, with essentially just one product in endless iterations, has become by far the biggest toymaker in the world by sales, and on a different level altogether in terms of profits.
^"The message is the medium". Intellectual Property Office blog. Gov.uk. Archived from the original on 20 August 2022. Retrieved 20 August 2022.
^Andersen, Jens (2021). The LEGO Story. Mariner Books. p. 79. ISBN978-0-06-325802-0. A Mr. Printz, the managing director of Hoffmann & Co., and the person who sold Ole Kirk the Windsor machine, came to visit Billund. He'd just returned from England, bringing with him a box filled with small, bricklike plastic blocks in various colors, which he'd seen at the British Industries Fair in London. Perhaps, he suggested, LEGO could make something similar once the Windsor molding machine arrived in Denmark and was set up in Billund. Ole Kirk was spellbound by the English bricks, which were hollow and featured studs on the top.
^Andersen, Jens (2021). The LEGO Story. Mariner Books. p. 83. ISBN978-0-06-325802-0. The origin of LEGO's very first plastic bricks isn't in dispute. Godtfred explained on several occasions that they were inspired by the English firm Kiddicraft, founded by Hilary Fisher Page in the 1930s.
^Andersen, Jens (2021). The LEGO Story. Mariner Books. pp. 241–242. ISBN978-0-06-325802-0. The case was also heard in Hong Kong in 1986, and that was the first time Godtfred told the detailed story of LEGO's development of Hilary F. Page's "Self-Locking Building Bricks" under oath, admitting that they'd copied the English bricks "very carefully," as was noted in the court transcript. It was a difficult moment for Godtfred. While in strictly legal terms he'd never acted illegally in relation to Page and Kiddicraft, he'd nonetheless always felt twinges of guilt.
^Cendrowicz, Leo (28 January 2008). "Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building". Time. Archived from the original on 5 March 2022. Retrieved 5 March 2022. Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion Lego elements, or 62 bricks for every person on the planet.
^"World Record". Lego. Archived from the original on 4 November 2014. Retrieved 6 September 2015.
^ abAlexander, Ruth (3 December 2012). "How tall can a Lego tower get?". BBC News. Archived from the original on 4 December 2012. Retrieved 4 December 2012. The average maximum force the bricks can stand is 4,240N. That's equivalent to a mass of 432 kg (950lbs). If you divide that by the mass of a single brick, which is 1.152g, then you get the grand total of bricks a single piece of Lego could support: 375,000. So, 375,000 bricks towering 3.5 kilometers (2.17 miles) high is what it would take to break a Lego brick.
Clague, Kevin; Agullo, Miguel; Hassing, Lars C. (2003). LEGO Software Power Tools, With LDraw, MLCad, and LPub. Syngress. ISBN1-931836-76-0.
Courtney, Tim; Herrera, Ahui; Bliss, Steve (2003). Virtual LEGO: The Official LDraw.org Guide to LDraw Tools for Windows. San Francisco: No Starch Press. ISBN1-886411-94-8.
McKee, Jacob H (2003). Getting Started with LEGO Trains. San Francisco: No Starch Press. ISBN1-59327-006-2.
