
Updated April 8, 2024
(January 2, 2022) 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 – Although this day is often seen as the birth of Lego as we know it, the company itself was 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”.
- 1949 – 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.
- 1949 – 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!
- 1975 – When the Lego Mini-figure 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.
- 1976 – LEGO created the first mini-figure in 1976. Since then, LEGO has created over 4 billion mini-figures, making it the world’s largest population group
- 1999 – In 1999, LEGO licensed its first-themed LEGO set, Star Wars.
- 2009 – 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!
- 2017 – Brand Finance, a business consultancy group, announced Lego had surpassed Google, Nike, Ferrari, and Visa to claim the top spot.
- 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.
- 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..
- The plural of LEGO is LEGO
- The word “LEGO” is actually a combination of two Danish words: “leg,” which means play, and “godt,” which means good.
- In Latin, Lego means “I put together.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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