How Many LEGO Sets Are Sold Every Minute?

International Lego Day is held on the very same day that Danish carpenter, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, first submitted his patent for the original Lego brick in 1958.

Like no other brick that had come before this toy brick would have a sophisticated interlocking brick system, making it strong, versatile, and less likely to fall apart when simply knocked over.

• 1932 – Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, founded the Lego company to manufacture wooden toys.
• 1949 – Lego bricks were introduced. In the 17 years from 1949 to 1966, Lego grew exponentially into a global company that was retailing in 42 countries. They boasted a product range that now contained 57 Lego sets and 25 Lego vehicles and with factories that were producing more than 706 million Lego elements each year – but the company didn’t stop growing.
• 1958 – Despite the first Lego brick having been made in 1958, you could still interlock one with a Lego brick built today – the design hasn’t changed a bit!
• 1967 – 1967 the LEGOLAND Band was established and in 1968, the very first LEGOLAND opened its doors to the public, attracting more than 625,000 visitors in its first season. Today there are 9 LEGOLANDS across Europe, Asia and the US, with a further three due to open in the next few years.
• 1976 – Realizing that the sets might be more fun if a human dimension was added, the company releases the iconic yellow-faced humanoid bricks.[
• 1999 – LEGO licensed its first-themed LEGO set, Star Wars.
• 2009 – James May created a house entirely out of Lego! The house took over 3.3 million bricks to make and even had a working toilet, a bed, and a shower!
• 2014 – When watching his son play with LEGOs, a Hollywood producer gets the idea to make an animated movie. It is a huge hit and grosses more than $450 million, with more films coming in the following years
• 2016 – LandRover 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.
• 2017 – Brand Finance, a business consultancy group, announced Lego had surpassed Google, Nike, Ferrari, and Visa to claim the top spot.
• The name Lego from the Danish words “LEg GOdt” which translates to “play well”.
• In Latin, Lego means “I put together.”
• Ahead of their time, Lego was the first toy company to buy an injection mold
• If Lego Minifigures were classed as a population, they’d be the largest 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.
• Lego is now so popular that 7 sets are sold every second.
• If you were to collect all the Lego bricks in the world and stack them together, they would be 2,386,065 miles tall!
• LEGO sells over 400 million tires each year, which makes LEGO the largest tire manufacturer in the world.
• The plural of LEGO is LEGO
• If laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in one year would reach over 5 times around the globe
• There are 86 LEGO bricks for every person on earth.
• There are over 400 billion Lego bricks in the world. Stacked together, they would be 2,386,065 miles tall, which is ten times the distance to the moon.
• A single LEGO brick can support 375,000 other LEGO bricks before buckling. This means that a person could build a LEGO tower 2.17 miles high before the bottom LEGO brick would begin to break.
• There are over 915 million ways to combine 6 LEGO bricks
• Every second, about 1,300 Lego pieces are made around the world. That adds up to 78,000 per minute and nearly 4.7 million every hour.
• About 86 percent of Lego minifigures are male.
• Most Lego minifigures don’t have noses.
• The numbers inside each Lego brick tell a story.  The number on the underside of your bricks corresponds to the precise mold that was used to form the brick before it was placed in packaging. Lego can trace the issue back to its origins if there are any defects.
• AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO) collect LEGO bricks from lots of different sets to make colorful MOCs (My Own Creation)
• Most AFOLs spend between 1-10 hours per week on building with LEGO bricks.
• About 20 billion Lego pieces are made every year in the Lego manufacturing facility in Billund, Denmark. When you break that down, it means the plant is producing about 2 million pieces every hour, or 35,000 every single minute.

Sources

Days of the Year

Fact Retriever 

Interesting Engineering

Lego

Brick Fans

National Today