The LEGO brick turns 50, buys a corvette
As my google homepage was kind enough to point out, the lego brick turns 50 today.
The 50 year anniversary is for the little plastic brick, not the company. The company itself was founded 76 years ago as a wooden toy company.
The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO – a fusion of the Danish words “LEg” and “GOdt” (“play well”).
LEGO has re-released one of their original sets, the Town Plan, in honor of the occasion.
One thing that has really amazed me about LEGO bricks (besides the whole best-toy-ever angle) is the level of control they have on the tolerances for each brick. They are made from ABS plastic, which has a shrinkage of around five thousandths of a millimeter for every millimeter of dimension of the part. According to LEGO, thier tolerance is one thousanth of a millimeter. Too small and the parts won’t come apart, too big and they won’t stick together. To get that across billions of bricks, and across 50 years of technology changes for tooling, and across all the hurdles of mold design and lifespan, that is pretty impressive.
