What shapes do you like to make most by Lego bricks? I once made a dinosaur! Let’s discover five great Lego facts for kids.
Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of LEGO was the one who created the name “LEGO”. He chose this name by taking the first two letters of the Danish word “LEG GODT”, which translates to “play well”. Ole Kirk Christiansen, who was a Danish carpenter, began making wooden toys and went on to create The LEGO Group in 1932.
The famous LEGO brick that we play with today was actually patented in 1958 by Godtfred Kirk, the son of Ole Kirk Christiansen. The bricks made in 1958 will still fit perfectly with those you play with today. LEGO is today recognized as one of the largest toy companies in the world. Today most LEGO pieces are made from ABS plastic, a high-quality plastic which ensures they never decompose.
In 2009, the Top Gear presenter, James May created the first full-sized LEGO house in Surrey, Great Britain. A team of builders used over 3 million LEGO bricks in order to build the house. It included a working toilet, shower, and a bed, which were all made out of LEGO bricks. I can’t imagine that the bed and pillow would be the most comfortable to sleep on. He even had slippers made out of LEGO bricks. You may wonder how such small bricks could hold the weight of a house, however, a single LEGO brick can support over 370,000 other LEGO bricks before breaking under the weight.
The LEGO manufacturing company works hard and very fast to get as many LEGO pieces created each day. Over 1,300 LEGO pieces are made per second, over 70,000 per minute and over 4,500,000 per hour. It is hard to even imagine that many LEGO pieces! With that many LEGO pieces being made so fast, you would think there’d be many mistakes. However, the LEGO moulding process is so accurate that only 18 elements in every million do not pass the company’s high quality standard. It is said that there are over 80 LEGO bricks for every person on earth.
When you think of tire manufacturing, Michelin Group or Pirelli Tyres may come to mind, but certainly not LEGO. LEGO produces over 400 million LEGO tires a year, which is roughly over 870,000 each day. Although their tires may be much smaller than standard tires, LEGO is still considered as the world’s largest tire manufacturer.
We may consider China as the world’s largest population, however if we include LEGO Minifigures in this then they take the title of world’s largest population by a mile. There are over 4 billion LEGO Minifigures around the world and this figure is constantly rising. The first LEGO Minifigures that were made in 1978 had yellow skin, two black dots for eyes, and a wide smile. This was said to represent people from all over the world. In 2003, the LEGO group gave Minifigures realistic skin tones, facial expressions, and modelled hair.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about LEGO much as we loved teaching you about it. Now that you know how majestic this game is, you can move on to learn about other games like: Board Games, Play-Doh Games and Osmo.
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