Why is lego called lego ? The small, colorful bricks that encourage a child’s imagination with their multitude of building possibilities have spawned two movies and Legoland theme parks. But more than that, these simple building blocks keep children as young as 5 engaged in creating castles, towns and space stations, and anything else their creative minds can think of. This is the epitome of the educational toy wrapped up in fun. These attributes have made Lego an icon in the toy world.

Beginnings

The company that makes these famous interlocking bricks started as a small shop in Billund, Denmark. The company was established in 1932 by master carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, who was aided by his 12-year-old son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen. It made wooden toys, stepladders, and ironing boards. It wasn’t until two years later that the business took the name of Lego, which came from the Danish words “LEg GOdt,” meaning “play well.”

Over the next several years, the company grew exponentially. From just a handful of employees in the early years, Lego had grown to 50 employees by 1948. The product line had grown as well, with the addition of a Lego duck, clothes hangers, a Numskull Jack on the goat, a plastic ball for babies, and some wooden blocks.

In 1947, the company made a huge purchase that was to transform the company and make it world-famous and a household name. In that year, Lego bought a plastic injection-molding machine, which could mass produce plastic toys. By 1949, Lego was using this machine to produce about 200 different kinds of toys, which included automatic binding bricks, a plastic fish and a plastic sailor. The automatic binding bricks were the predecessors of the Lego toys of today.

Birth of the Lego Brick

In 1953, the automatic binding bricks were renamed Lego bricks. In 1957, the interlocking principle of Lego bricks was born, and in 1958, the stud-and-coupling system was patented, which added significant stability to built pieces. And this transformed them into the Lego bricks children use today. Also in 1958, Ole Kirk Christiansen died and his son Godtfred became head of the Lego company.

By the early 1960s, Lego had gone international, with sales in Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, and Lebanon. Over the next decade, Lego toys were available in more countries, and they came to the United States in 1973.

Lego Sets

In 1964, for the first time, consumers could buy Lego sets, which included all the parts and instructions to build a particular model. In 1969, the Duplo series—bigger blocks for smaller hands—was introduced for the 5-and-under set. Lego later introduced themed lines, including town (1978), castle (1978), space (1979), pirates (1989), Western (1996), Star Wars (1999), and Harry Potter (2001). Figures with movable arms and legs were introduced in 1978.

As of 2018, Lego has sold 75 billion of its bricks in more than 140 countries 1 Since the middle of the 20th century, these small plastic bricks have sparked the imagination of children around the world, and Lego sets have a stronghold on their place at the top of the list of the world’s most popular toys.

How It All Came Together

BILLUND, Denmark — Once upon a time, in this village not far from the home of Hans Christian Andersen, there lived a carpenter who was very sad. It was during a depression, and he could not find a job.

One day the carpenter, WrIOSe name was Ole Kirk Christiansen, had an idea: He would make wooden toys—elephants on wheels, yo‐yos and other things. He started a company and called it Lego. The name (pronounced “LAY‐go”) came from the Danish words leg godt, which mean to play well.

Children loved the carpenter’s toys.

And when his son invented a plastic brick that could be used to create things, the company grew very big. Today Lego bricks are sold in more than 100 countries, and the Kirk Christiansen family would not part with the company for $100 million.

The story of Lego is not well known outside Denmark, but its brightly, colored interlocking bricks have virtually revolutionized the worldwide toy market. Demand in the United States, %%there Lego bricks were ineptly marketed for 12 years, has soared since 1973. Lego bricks have entered about 5 million American households.

According to Vagn Hoick Andersen, president of Interlego A.S., the top entity in the Lego corporate structure, 1977 American sales will exceed last year’s $27 million, which was up from only $1.7 million four years ago.

The main attraction of Lego bricks is the fact that they are “creative” toys designed to help children unleash their imagination. This appeals particularly to better‐educated parents, who are usually better able to pay Lego’s relatively high prices.

“We consider we sell possibilities,” said 0. Thygesen Damm, Lego’s bearded director of research. “That is why we insist that all new elements can combine with the old.”

There are two basic types of Lego bricks—one mainly for children from to 12 and the other a double‐sized nurs- ery line that is easier to snap together and pull apart.

The main ingredient in all Lego toys is granules of a chemical called ABS. (Wooden toys were discontinued after factory fire in 1959.) Lego bricks are simple to manufacture, but the company’s packing costs are high because the bricks come in five basic colors and scores of sizes and shapes.

Lego officials refuse to divulge the amount of total sales or any data at all about earnings. But apparently their company will sell about $160 million worth of Lego products this year. About $5 million more in revenues will come from its Legoland amusement park, next door to the factory here, and the hotel it bought to preserve the neighborhood. Profits, Mr. Hoick Andersen acknowledges, “are very high, but we need a high profit margin to finance a very seasonal business.”

The Lego company was hit hard by the worldwide recession. It is now going through what it calls a consolidation phase, in which 125 employees were laid off last fall. The sprawling, modern assembly‐line factory here has 1,800 workers.

There was a decline in worldwide Lego sales in 1975 and 1976, and earnings fell last year. Lego also expects this year’s earnings to be down. American sales climbed 28 percent in 1976, but this was less than the 80 percent surge the company had expected. This year’s improvement is said to be only “slight.”

“This hasn’t been a good year for the toy industry in America,” said Jack M. Sullivan, the 42-year-old former Lorillard marketing man who heads Lego’s American operation. “And we do feel our brand is price‐sensitive.”

Lego’s bricks—the basic eight-studded one is roughly the size of a rectangular sugar lump—are said by the company’s psychologists to meet many of children’s needs.

One of their needs is to learn hand‐eye coordination. Another is to make something of their own. (Lego says that, although the results may seem awkward to an adult, they satisfy a child, whose critical sense is not as well developed as his imagination.) And the bricks are designed to provide a harmless outlet for the basic urge to destroy as well as to create.

Some people criticized Lego in the 1960’s when it supplemented the basic assortment of bricks with so‐called model boxes containing just the pieces needed to build a specific pictured object. The critics complained thatthii reduced the imaginative element, a charge Mr. Hoick Andersen only partly disputes.

“We did weaken our commitment to the basic Lego by going too heavy on the models,” he said. But he adds that, after a model is built several times, its pieces tend to be dumped into a box with all the others. This helps produce a sizable Lego heap; the company calculates that each child who gets a first box will eventually get 1.943 boxes, on the average.

More than 97 percent of Lego’s production here is sold overseas, an amount equal to 1 percent of Denmark’s manufactured exports. West Germany, buying about $30 million a year, is Lego’s No. 1 customer, with the United States second and France third. The company’s leaflets are printed in 25 languages.

Lego has been careful to protect its inventions, but the main patents have begun to expire, and other companies are now producing similar bricks. Mr. Ambeck‐Madsen said, “We had the patents when we were small and really needed them. We’re not afraid now.”

Two Japanese competitors have fallen by the wayside, but the Kawada Company, selling bricks more cheaply than Lego, remains in the race. Kawada’s bricks are sold in the United States under the name Loc Bloc.

Lego says it is difficult for competitors to reproduce its bricks. Lego’s injection‐molding machines, for example, are built in its own shops to achieve tolerances within two‐thousandths of millimeter, so precise that the bricks are said to lock a bit stiffly the first nine times but thereafter to grip perfectly for years. The bricks are also produced in Britain, Switzerland and Canada.

Despite Lego’s enormous success, both with toys and with its 10‐acre Legoland park (a kind of miniature Disneyland), the company’s history is full of setbacks and missed opportunities.

One was a license agreement with the Samsonite Corporation in which Lego failed from 1961 to 1972 to exploit the American market. Lego finally negotiated its way out of the agreement, setting up its own subsidiary in Enfield, Conn., in 1973. Mr. Sullivan, now in charge at Enfield, calls the former setup “a disaster.”

About 60 percent of the boxes sold this year in the United States were packed in Enfield from imported components. The rest were shipped finished from Lego’s headquarters here on the Jutland moors, about 150 miles west of Copenhagen. No production of bricks is expected in Enfield until 1980 or 1981.

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