LEGO

Lego is a line of toys manufactured by Lego Group, a privately held company based in Denmark. more...

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Its flagship product, also commonly referred to as Lego, consists of colourful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures (also called minifigs or "Lego People"), and other pieces which can be assembled and connected in myriad combinations. Many interlocking accessories, including cars, planes, trains, buildings, castles, sculptures, ships, spaceships, and even working robots are available for purchase. Lego bricks are noted for their precision and quality of manufacture, resulting in an inexpensive yet uniformly high-quality product. The word "Lego" comes from Danish leg godt which translates to "play well". The name could also be interpreted as "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin, though this would be a somewhat forced application of the general sense "I collect; I gather; I learn"; the word is most used in the derived sense, "I read". The cognate Greek verb "λέγω" also means "gather, pick up", but this can include constructing a stone wall.

Early history

See also: Lego timeline

The Lego Group had very humble beginnings in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a poor carpenter from Billund, Denmark. The original motto was 'det bedste er ikke for godt', or "Only the best is good enough". This motto was created by Christiansen to try to encourage his employees to never skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly. Christiansen started creating wooden toys in 1932, however in 1947, he and his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen obtained samples of interlocking plastic bricks produced by the company Kiddicraft. These "Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks" were designed and patented in the UK by Hilary Harry Fisher Page, a child psychologist. A few years later, in 1949, Lego began producing similar bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks." The first Lego bricks, manufactured from cellulose acetate, were developed in the spirit of traditional wooden blocks that could be stacked upon one another; however, these plastic bricks could be "locked" together. They had several round "studs" on top, and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they could not be pulled apart.

The company name Lego was coined by Christiansen from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well".

The use of plastic for toy manufacture was not highly regarded by retailers and consumers of the time. Many of the Lego Group's shipments were returned, following poor sales; it was thought that plastic toys could never replace wooden ones.

Read more at Wikipedia.org