Incredible Facts
The Danish company Lego overtook Mattel in 2014 to become the largest toy company in the world.
Their plastic bricks can be found anywhere in the world, and they're perfect for teaching kids to think creatively and discover new horizons.
Here are 20 Lego facts that might surprise you:
1. Lego didn't invent Lego bricks.
During the Great Depression, no one wanted to buy expensive wooden furniture, so woodworker Ole Kirk Kristiansen decided to create wooden toys in 1932, and in 1934 He founded Lego in the year.
Ole Kirk Christiansen
He started selling his toys in Billund, Denmark, unaware that his wooden constructors would eventually lead to the world-famous Lego brand.
Ole Kirk Christiansen at work
In 1949, a seller offered Christiansen a plastic injection molding machine to save him from long manual work.
Read also: Useful LEGO ideas, tips and games for kids and adults
Godtfred Christiansen
The master, along with his son Godtfred, became interested in one of the samples the seller had, namely bricks that were interconnected. Later, he decided to create such bricks himself.
2. The numbers inside each brick have their own story.
Inside the Lego details, you can see small numbers that indicate what shape it was created in and what its position was in the row at the time of manufacture. Thus, in the event of a defect, the part can be created again.
Read also: Incredible ideas for non-standard use of LEGO parts
3. Lego bricks are incredibly strong.
Scientists decided to post a video on YouTube in which they built a device that can repeat the same movements many times, namely to connect and disconnect Lego bricks.
Only after 37,112 connections and disconnections did they notice a crack on one of the bricks. One Lego brick can withstand a weight of 430 kg.
Lego wheels
4. Lego makes more tires than Goodyear.
Lego makes so many small tires for its toy cars that it is far ahead of Goodyear, Firestone, or Michelin, which produce tires for real cars.
Lego produces about 320 million tires a year. According to the company, almost half of all kits created by the company contain wheels.
Lego vs guns
5. Lego for peace.
The company has vowed never to produce any toy military kits for children. Until 1999, the company did not even produce small toy weapons. Later, they began producing sets with weapons, but only fairytale ones, where good fights evil.
Lego little men
6. Yellow mini lego figures for a reason.
Lego mini figures first appeared in 1975. They were faceless box-shaped men so that children could invent any character out of them. Later, the figures found faces and floors, but they always remained yellow. According to Lego, this is the most race neutral color.
Today, you can still see Lego toy men in a different shade (in the NBA set, for example). The company changes the color of a little man only if he belongs to a particular person.
7. Lego men's heads contain holes for a reason.
If you remove everything superfluous from the little man and pay attention to his head, you can see several holes. They are designed so that if a child decides to swallow the part, the holes allow air to enter the lungs, significantly reducing the risk of suffocation and allowing the child to breathe.
Lego minifigures
8. Lego figures are getting angrier.
Scientists at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand studied more than 3,000 Lego figures created between 1975 and 2010. They came to the conclusion that facial expressions on the figures were gradually turning from nicer and more pleasant to more sullen and even vicious.
In recent years, more and more characters with sullen faces have appeared in Lego collections, and research leader Christoph Bartneck has expressed concern that such a change mood can affect children.
Lego for adults
9. Adult Lego fans are the company's most loyal customers.
It is adult Lego fans who buy the most expensive sets and individual parts. But at the very beginning and for several years, companies considered adults playing Lego strange and even “a little crazy”.
Read also: The biggest LEGO model consists of 5 million parts
However, after retailers criticized the company for not trying hard to please everyone interested in its products, Lego changed its mind, and now adult customers are regular customers of Lego sets, they are also briefly called AFOL (Adults Fans of LEGO, meaning “adult Lego fans”).
Lego ideas
10. Offer your own versions of Lego sets and the company will hear you.
With a presence on social media, Lego allows members of the Lego community to suggest different ideas for new sets. If you think the world needs exactly your Lego set idea, feel free to suggest it. By using existing details, applicants can visually showcase their ideas.
If an idea gets 10,000 votes, it will go to the company's development department, where someone will start exploring all the possibilities (including financial ones) to implement it.
Quick facts about Lego toys
1. Why can a set sometimes contain more parts than you need?
The answer to this question is quite simple — some parts are too light to be weighed when parts are distributed at the factory.
2. The Lego Duplo bricks are 8 times larger than regular bricks, but both types of bricks can be joined together.
3. On average, every person in the world owns 86 Lego pieces.
4. In 2012, 45.7 billion parts were created (5.2 million per hour).
If you put all these parts together, you get a snake that can wrap around the Earth 18 times.
At the Lego factory (video)
5. The Lego company's name comes from two Danish words “Leg Godt”, which means “play well”.
6. The first Lego mini figure was created in 1978, and since then more than 4 billion figures have been created.
7. The first version of the LEGO MINDSTORMS series was launched in 1998 and was created in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
8. If you take 8 2×4 bricks, you can create 915,103,765 different combinations from them.
Lego used computers to calculate and obtain this data.
If you use 2 figures (2×4), the combination number is 24, and with three similar details, the maximum number of combinations is 1,060.