January 28th is International LEGO Day, honouring the popular construction toy! The Lego Group began in the workshop of the Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen. In 1932, he started producing wooden toys during the Great Depression. The word Lego is a contraction from the Danish phrase "leg godt", "play well". After WWII, as plastic became more available, Lego started to produce Lego bricks. Playing Lego is great for kids to develop problem-solving, motor skills, agility, strength in the fingers, focus, and more! It is on 28th January because it marks the day the first patent for the Lego brick was submitted in Denmark.
10 Super-Fun Facts about LEGO
In 2016 Land Rover set the World Record for the largest piece of LEGO construction with their huge 43-foot-high replica of Tower Bridge. This monumental structure used 5,805,846 individual pieces of LEGO which would have stretched all the way to Paris in France if laid out end to end.
If LEGO Minifigures were to be classed as a population, they’d be the largest population in the world! With more than 4 billion of them in total.
There are so many LEGO bricks in the world, that it’s estimated that they outnumber people 80 to 1.
Despite the first plastic LEGO brick having been made in 1949, you could still interlock one with a LEGO brick-built today – the design hasn’t changed a bit!
In 2009, James May created a house entirely out of LEGO. It took more than 3.3 million bricks to make and even had a working toilet, a bed, and a shower!
LEGO sets are now so popular that 7 sets are sold every second.
Although LEGO is played with by both girls and boys, women and men, they still have a bit of a way to go before they reach gender equality with roughly 86% of their LEGO Minifigures being male.
If you were to collect all the LEGO bricks in the world and stack them together then they would be 2,386,065 miles tall.
Although LEGO makes toys they are also classed as the world’s biggest tire manufacturer, making over 400 million tires each year to keep their fleet of various LEGO vehicles rolling.
While LEGO was the first to patent the LEGO brick that we know today, they didn’t technically invent them. The story has it that the salesman who came to sell Godtfred his first plastic injection mold machine was carrying an example interlocking brick in his pocket which had been designed and patented by Hilary Fisher Page. Godtfred improved on the design by perforating the brick and adding tubes on the bottom to help tighten the connection.
LEGO is now recognised as the World’s Most Powerful Brand, towering over Google, Nike, and Ferrari to claim the top spot.
