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.
- Although this day is often seen as the birth of Lego as we know it, the company itself was in fact founded by Godtfred in 1932, creating a variety of wooden toys, and taking the name Lego from the Danish words “LEg GOdt” which translate to “play well”.
- Ahead of their time, Lego was one of the very first toy manufacturing companies to buy an injection mold machine with which to create plastic toys, a move which shortly led them to create the very first plastic Lego brick in 1949.
- In the 17 years from 1949 to 1966, Lego grew exponentially into a global company that was retailing in 42 countries. They now 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.
- If Lego Minifigures were to be classed as a population, they’d be the largest population 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.
- 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!
- In 2009, James May created a house entirely out of Lego! The house took more than 3.3 million bricks to make and even had a working toilet, a bed, and a shower!
- 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 then 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.
- LEGO created the first minifigure in 1978. Since then, LEGO has created over 4 billion minifigures, making it the world’s largest population group.
- 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 4 hundred billion Lego bricks in the world. Stacked together, they would be 2,386,065 miles tall, which is ten times higher than 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.
- In 1999, LEGO licensed its first-themed LEGO set, Star Wars.
- There are over 915 million ways to combine 6 LEGO bricks
- When the Lego Minifigure was introduced in 1975, the company wanted the builders to project their imaginations onto faceless figures. Yellow was believed to be a racially-neutral color. Although today, they do come in other colors.
- 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. If there are any defects, Lego can trace the issue back to its origins.
- AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO) collect LEGO bricks from lots of different sets to make colourful MOCs (My Own Creation)
- Most AFOLs spend between 1-10 hours per week on building with LEGO bricks.
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