Portal:Denmark/Selected article/Week 36, 2006
Lego is a line of toys manufactured by Lego Group, a privately-held company based in Denmark. Its flagship product, also commonly referred to as Lego, consists of colorful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures (also called minifigs or "Lego People"), and other pieces which can be assembled and connected in myriad combinations. Many interlocking accessories, including cars, planes, trains, buildings, castles, sculptures, ships, spaceships, and even working robots are available for purchase. Lego bricks are noted for their precision and quality of manufacture, resulting in an expensive yet uniformly high-quality product.
The Lego Group had humble beginnings in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a poor carpenter from Billund, Denmark. Christiansen started creating wooden toys in 1932, however in 1947, he and his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen obtained samples of interlocking plastic bricks produced by the company Kiddicraft. These "Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks" were designed and patented in the UK by Hilary Harry Fisher Page, a child psychologist. A few years later, in 1949, Lego began producing similar bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks." The first Lego bricks, manufactured from cellulose acetate, were developed in the spirit of traditional wooden blocks that could be stacked upon one another; however, these plastic bricks could be "locked" together. They had several round "studs" on top, and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they could not be pulled apart.