Christiansen who invented an interlocking brick and then he named it LEGO after the first two letter of the Danish words ‘Leg Godt’ which means ‘play well’. By coincidence the word is also Latin for ‘I put together’.
Towards the end of the 1940s, Ole Kirk Christiansen was beginning to realize the huge potential of plastic as a new and exciting medium and seized the opportunity to add to the existing wooden range.
In 1949, LEGO began producing the famous interlocking bricks, calling them ‘Automatic Binding Brocks’.
From these early beginnings LEGO has grown to be a substantial international brand on average, every person in the world has 5 LEGO bricks and more than 400 million children and adults spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO.
In 1954, Christiansen’s son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen joined his father to strengthen the firm’s international reach. Godtfred saw the immense potential in KEGO brick as a vehicle for creative play. The modern LEGO brick was patented in January 1958.
The LEGO company created the minifigure in 1974. This figure did not have functioning arms and legs, yet it changed the way people play with the bricks, allowing for role playing.
The LEGO products are on sale in more than 130 countries, with four LEGO sets sold each second.
LEGO: The history
