For over fifty years, both children and their parents around the planet have spent many hours playing and building things with Lego bricks. What exactly you can create with the bricks is limited simply by how many pieces you have and your own ideas. Though intended as a children’s game, the product has many adult fans too and a quick search on an internet search engine will throw up some amazing and clever designs.
Proving that it doesn’t lose its appeal as we get older, the most amazing thing I’ve seen done with Lego was the human sized two storey house, complete with a working bathroom and a bed which television presenter James May stated was the most uncomfortable bed he had ever spent a night in. I must state here that I might have toned down the colour scheme for the house somewhat, or I believe I’d have been wearing sunglasses in the place and needing Laser eye surgery to save my eyes from hurting so much! Constructing an object so big could obviously only be done with a lot of help and a large sum of money, but the human imagination can dream up some fantastic creations even with only a much smaller number of bricks available to use.
The Lego story began in 1932 in a quiet town in Denmark where a man called Ole Kirk Christansen founded a factory producing wooden toys for kids. He asked his staff to come up with a title for the factory, but in the end thought of one himself by merging the Danish words ‘Leg’ and Godt’, meaning ‘Play Well’, an appropriate name if ever there was one!
He soon realised that plastic was a great deal more durable than wood when utilised for toy production, and invested in the pioneering first injection moulding machine ever used in Denmark. He began experimenting with plastic building bricks and in 1949 he developed the prototype for Lego bricks. The concept was launched onto the market in 1958, and although there have clearly been a lot of additions to the original product in terms of colours and shapes, the size of the pieces has always remained consistent enough that Lego pieces bought today would still fit together perfectly with the original 1958 bricks.
These days, Lego products are produced in Denmark, Mexico and the Czech Republic and all factories are subject to the same exceptionally high quality standards which make sure that the pieces across the globe will always click together and stay together exactly. The margin of error for the size of the bricks is so small as to be almost unimaginable to the human brain. The variances permitted are in fact so tiny that I have to assume that they are monitored by something like a Laser eye beam and a computer program to check such consistency.
The Lego business is one of the best toy manufacturers in the world based on profit, and has around 4,500 staff. At the end of the 20th Century it gained awards in both America and Great Britain as the ‘Toy Of The Century’ and I doubt that there are many people who would disagree with that accolade.
There are allegedly 2,400 different Lego pieces, which is an a huge amount of shapes, sizes and colours! Of course, in the 21st Century, a great deal of the Lego bought is in kit form and is designed to result in predetermined objects ranging from a fort to a helicopter, a pirate ship to a space rocket and loads more besides. Many of the kits are based on films or television shows, so, for example, you can create something like your own Star Wars universe, including most of the characters, spacecraft, droids and even Mos Eisley Cantina! But even Lego’s inventive creators are yet to work out how to get the lightsabers to shoot with a authentic Laser eye beam!
For children who want to create Lego scenes which are more identifiable, there is the City range of kits, which enables you to have all of the buildings, vehicles and people you need for your town – police, fire brigade, the airport, trains, farms and a great deal more so that you can douse the flames of fires, pilot planes and arrest people. I’m sure, in time, you’ll even have kits that allow you to remove a Lego appendix, carry out Lego Laser eye surgery or drill into Lego teeth!
I used to maintain that advertising so many kits was a bit of a shame. I often asked to what extent they have deprived the youngsters of today of the opportunity to use their own imaginations to create unique shapes and models. But now I’ve changed my opinion and think that the kits are a good idea as long as nobody demands that they must be built as illustrated on the box. For example, look at a wheel and remember how many other objects are that sort of shape. You’ll soon realise that the human imagination is way more creative than you think!
