Dutch English

8 December 2014

LEGO

by Ole Kirk Christiansen
Label: LEGO Group

Year: 1949

 

LEGO. Who has not played with it? The name originates from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means ‘play well’. Only later, it became apparent that in Latin, LEGO can be interpreted as ‘I assemble’ or ‘I learn’.

Since 1930, the Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen had a workshop in which he had started to make houses and furniture to scale, as design models. When the effects of the economic crisis of the 1930s started to be felt and the amount of work decreased, he decided to set up a toy factory with his design models. He also added wooden cars to his line.

In 1947, Christiansen got his hands on some plastic building blocks made by Kiddicraft, designed by the British Hilary Harry Fisher Page. Two years after receiving the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks, Christiansen started production of the Automatic Binding Bricks. The blocks looked like the current LEGO blocks, but were hollow on the underside. After 1958, the building blocks were produced with hollow tubes,  which allowed for the building of stronger objects.

The blocks received the name LEGO in 1953: LEGO Mursten, or LEGO Bricks.