Today is the 90th anniversary of the creation of a popular toy that you and probably everyone you know has played with at one time or another. It’s the birthday of LEGO.
If you’ve been living under a rock, LEGOs are those plastic building-block toys that rose to massive popularity in the mid-20th century. You know the ones? Your kids build a castle or a barn and leave several lying hidden in the carpet just waiting for you to step on one and ….. YEE-OUCH!
LEGO blocks originated in the Billund, Denmark, workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, who began making wooden toys in 1932. Two years later he named his company LEGO after the Danish phrase leg godt (“play well”). In 1949 LEGO produced its first plastic brick, a precursor to its signature brick with interlocking studs on the top and tubes on the bottom. It was patented in 1958 by Christiansen’s son Godtfred Kirk, who replaced his father as the head of the company.
LEGO bricks soon caught on throughout Europe, and in 1968 the first LEGOLAND theme park opened in Billund (additional parks were later established in other locations internationally). In 1969 the company started selling the DUPLO line of larger bricks for young children who had trouble handling the regular LEGO bricks. Nine years later LEGO introduced Minifigures, the typically smiling yellow humanoids that became regular presences in the company’s themed play sets. MINDSTORMS products, which center on a programmable robotics pack containing customized bricks, were first launched in 1998, and they went through multiple iterations of increasing complexity over the succeeding years.
The basic LEGO brick has remained the same since it was patented, and this simple, child-friendly design has been credited with the toy’s longevity. As a result, these bricks have saturated the culture of childhood throughout much of the world. LEGO, which has remained in the Christiansen family for generations, was among the inaugural inductees to the U.S. National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998 and was named “Toy of the Century” by multiple authorities in 2000. LEGO blocks have been used to create everything from massive replicas of famous monuments (such as the Eiffel Tower and Mount Rushmore) to modern art.
In the 21st century the LEGO brand spun off into multiple electronic games—including a series of popular Minifigure action-adventure games centered on famed pop-culture properties such as the Star Wars films, Batman, Marvel Comics superheroes, and the Harry Potter books—as well as The LEGO Movie (2014), a hit computer-animated feature film that also revolved around the exploits of Minifigures. One of the fan-favorite characters from that film, Batman, was the subject of a stand-alone spin-off, The LEGO Batman Movie (2017).
To celebrate the milestone, Lego employees built a ginormous birthday cake made out of more than 94,000 Lego pieces weighing more than 200 kilograms. Check out a video or the massive “cake” HERE.
In the U.S. alone, LEGO Juris A/S holds more than a hundred registered trademarks, including a registration for LEGOLAND, the amusement parks built around the plastic blocks.