Nearly one hundred years ago, Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the founder of Lego, bought a carpenter´s workshop. The Great Depression almost caused his furniture business to go bankrupt and so he changed to the production of wooden toys. The name Lego was born and the famous Lego brick would follow twenty years later.
Ole opened his workshop in 1916 in the Danish village of Billund. Up until the world wide crisis he made a decent living, but in 1932 Ole´s world fell apart. His wife died, he was left behind with four small children and his business nearly went bankrupt. He started up a new business for quality wooden toys and asked his employees to come up with a suitable name. The best submission would be rewarded with a fine bottle of wine!
In the end, Ole himself won the contest with the name Lego, a contraction of Leg godt, which means ´play well´ in Danish. One of the first and most famous toys was the wooden duck on wheels, its beak moving up and down as you tow him along. This duck, first made in 1935, would make regular appearances on cartoon movies and in comics, as a cartoon character´s toy.
Origin of the Lego brick
After World War II, plastic became all the rage. It was still an expensive material to produce so Ole took a really big chance when he bought an extremely costly casting machine in 1947. The machine was imported from Great Britain and was one of the first in Denmark. Plastic toy cars and tractors sold especially well in a time when modernisation made its way into agriculture and there were more and more cars out on the roads. By 1951, already half of the toys that Lego produced were made of plastic.
Lego was already producing wooden building bricks when, in 1949, it designed the automatic binding bricks. The little bricks were hollow at the bottom and had studs on the top, to bring stability to constructions once the bricks were piled on top of each other. Improvement wasn´t far away though: in 1957 Ole designed the model with the three little tubes at the bottom. A year after that, he patented his design and the Lego brick of two by four studs hasn´t been changed ever since. It is still the foundation of all Lego systems.
Traffic safety
Ole came up with the principle of the Lego system in 1954: a complete themed construction package with which you can create whole new worlds. The first Lego system was called Town Plan 1 and consisted of construction kits for buildings, vehicles, residents, trees and traffic signs. This allowed children to create a realistic town. While designing Town Plan 1, Lego consulted the Danish Traffic Safety Board about how to introduce children to a rapidly changing streetscape in a constructive manner.
Ole´s son Godfried took over his father’s business in 1955 and focussed on the new Lego system. With Godfried in charge, all sorts of appealing themes were created throughout the years, such as knights, pirates, cowboys and Indians, police officers and fire fighters and astronauts with their corresponding aliens. Including of course, all the matching means of transportation, buildings, weapons and other accessories. Lego aims at a public of both boys and girls, but for the latter the company created a more charming product line featuring lots of pink and princesses: Lego Belville.
LEGO Viking chess game
Growth spurt
The Lego bricks and their endless construction possibilities rapidly became hugely popular, also outside of Denmark. The first international Lego office was opened in 1956 in the German town of Hohenweststedt. At the end of the sixties, Lego was known all over Europe and in 1968 even a Legoland theme park was opened in Billund. Since the end of the nineties, the toy manufacturer let itself be inspired by the movies and television: popular screen heroes were made into Lego versions, from Dora and Bob the Builder for the little ones to Star Wars and Harry Potter for the older children.
Today, Lego is the second largest toy producer in the world, Mattel taking first place. Lego factory Kornmarken, near the headquarters in Billund, makes toys round the clock. High-tech machines produce around 2,4 million plastic toy bricks per hour. There won´t be a shortage of Lego bricks any time soon… The creation of a Lego chess set was of course inevitable, and a number of different themes have made their way to the chess board. The Chessmen Museum is the proud owner of a Lego Viking chess game.