Ask for It by Name!

According to the LEGO web site, “On average every person on planet Earth has 52 LEGO bricks.” Aside from being a good illustration of the statistical slipperiness of the word “average” (many of us own no LEGO bricks whatsoever that we know of), that statement (along with “327 billion LEGO elements have been molded since 1949″) indicates that LEGO is one very hot toy company.

Although LEGO bricks are one of the world’s most successful uses of plastics, the company’s roots lie back in 1932 in the little town of Billund, Denmark, where plastics were probably very rare if not entirely unknown. In that year Ole Kirk Christiansen, a master carpenter, established a business manufacturing stepladders, ironing boards, stools and, presumably as a sideline, wooden toys. By 1934, however, toys had become a big enough part of the business that Ole renamed his business LEGO, from the Danish words “”Leg Godt,” meaning “play well.” A bit further on, he discovered that “lego” is, serendipitously, also Latin for “I put together.”

LEGO prospered and expanded over the following years, concentrating primarily on wooden toys such as the classic LEGO duck, and by 1949 had begun producing plastic “Automatic Binding Bricks,” the forerunner of today’s LEGO bricks. Oddly enough, at the 1955 international debut of LEGO bricks at a toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany, the reaction from those present was not positive. Undeterred, LEGO soldiered on, spewing out bricks and a wide variety of other toys on its march to each of us owning those average 52 bricks.

So ubiquitous have LEGO sets become that if one could wrest just the ones sold in the past ten years from the hands of their little owners and place them end to end, the assembly would stretch from London to Perth. To any parent whose living room has been transformed into a LEGO minefield, this vision brings to mind a more literal translation of that Latin “lego,” namely “to pick up, to gather together scattered objects.”