For over fifty years, both children and adults around the globe have spent a lot of time playing and making things with Lego bricks. What exactly you can make with the bricks is limited only by what quantity you have and your own imagination. Though developed as a children’s game, the product has countless adult fans too and a quick search on the internet will locate some amazing and innovative designs.
Proving that it doesn’t lose its appeal as we grow up, the most unbelievable thing I’ve seen done with Lego was the life sized two floor house, complete with a working bathroom and a bed which TV presenter James May stated was the most uncomfortable bed he had ever spent a night in. I must say here that I would have had to tone down the colour scheme for the house somewhat, or I feel I’d have been walking around in sunglasses indoors and needing Laser eye surgery to stop my eyes from hurting too much! Constructing an object so huge could obviously only be managed with a lot of help and a lot of money, but the human mind can dream up some fantastic creations even with only a considerably smaller amount of components available to use.
The Lego legacy began in 1932 in a small town in Denmark where a businessman known as Ole Kirk Christansen started a factory making wooden toys for children. He asked his employees to suggest a title for the business, but finally came up with one himself by merging the Danish words ‘Leg’ and Godt’, literally translated as ‘Play Well’, an ideal name if ever there was one!
He soon realised that plastic was much more durable than wood when utilised for toy production, and invested in the pioneering first injection moulding machine ever used in Denmark. He started testing plastic building blocks and in 1949 he came up with the prototype for Lego bricks. The product was launched onto the market in 1958, and even though there have obviously been many additions to the original product in terms of colours and shapes, the size of the pieces has always been consistent enough that Lego pieces purchased today would still fit together precisely with the original 1958 bricks.
These days, Lego products are made in Denmark, Mexico and the Czech Republic and all factories must conform to the same incredibly high production standards which mean that the pieces all over the world will always fit together and stay together properly. The margin of tolerance for the dimensions of the bricks is so miniscule as to be practically unimaginable to the human brain. The variances allowed are in fact so small that I can only assume that they are measured by something like a Laser eye beam and computer software to ensure such consistency.
The Lego company is one of the best toy manufacturers globally based on profit, and employs around 4,500 staff. At the end of the 1900s it was given awards in both the United States 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 supposed to be 2,400 different Lego pieces, which is an a huge amount of shapes, sizes and colours! Of course, in the 21st Century, a lot of the Lego bought is in kit form and is designed to build specific objects ranging from a fort to a fire engine, a pirate ship to a space rocket and loads more besides. A lot of the kits are inspired by films or television shows, so, for example, you can create something like your own Star Wars empire, including most of the characters, spacecraft, droids and even Mos Eisley Cantina! Although even Lego’s talented creators have yet to work out how to get the lightsabers to shoot with a authentic Laser eye beam!
For folk who wish to make Lego scenes which are more realistic, there is the City collection of kits, which enables you to have all of the buildings, vehicles and people you need to make your town – police, fire brigade, the airport, trains, farms and loads more so that you can extinguish the flames of fires, fly planes and arrest people. I expect, in time, you’ll even have kits that allow you to operate on a Lego appendix, carry out Lego Laser eye surgery or extract Lego teeth!
I used to believe that advertising so many kits was a bit of a pity. I often questioned how much they have deprived the children of today of the opportunity to use their own imaginations to build unique shapes and objects. But now I’ve revised my opinion and understand that the kits are fine as long as nobody says that they must be built as demonstrated on the box. For example, find a wheel and work out how many other objects are that kind of shape. You soon start to understand that the human imagination is far more ingenious than you think!
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