We played with them as a kid, and now they’re a great excuse to have kids, as long as you don’t step on them in the middle of the night (the LEGOs, not the kids). They’ve been delighting (and frustrating) millions of people for decades, and they have an endless array of possibilities. Here’s a look into the amazing world of LEGO.
The LEGO name comes from the Danish phrase, “leg godt,” which means, “play well.”
The LEGO Company was started in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Billund, Denmark. The company was handed down to one of his sons, Godtfred, after his death in 1958. LEGO bricks were launched in that year.
The famous LEGO brick was patented on January 28, 1958, and all 2×4 bricks are produced to this standard today.
The amount of LEGO people produced is roughly 4 billion. That’s more than the total of the top ten most populous countries with real humans.
There is an average of 62 LEGO pieces for every person on the planet.
More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1958.
The number of tires produced by LEGO makes it one of the world’s largest tire manufacturers.
If you take just six 2×4 LEGO bricks to build with, they can be combined in 915,103,765 different combinations.
Each LEGO mini-figure is exactly four blocks tall.
The bricks produced today will still interlock with the bricks produced in 1958.
Only 18 LEGO bricks in every million produced fail to meet the company’s standard of accuracy of two thousandths of a millimeter.
In Budapest, Hungary, the world’s tallest LEGO tower was constructed on May 25, 2014, from 450,000 bricks and rose to a height of 114 feet. It was topped with a Hungarian built Rubik’s Cube.
James May of Surrey, Great Britain made the world’s first full-size house made entirely out of LEGO bricks; 3.3 million bricks to be exact. The house took 1,200 volunteers over a month to build and was demolished shortly after that. The bricks were then donated to charity. The building of the house was done for May’s television series, James May’s Toy Stories. You may recognize May’s name if you’ve ever seen the UK version (and original) Top Gear. He was one of the co-hosts of the program.
According to Warner Bros. Pictures, in order to make The LEGO Movie, the creators used a total of 3,863,484 LEGO bricks mixed with computer animation. To make the entire film would have required 15,080,330 bricks, making the filming cost prohibitive.
