"The challenge is to make toys that allow kids to create, experiment, and explore."
Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Lab
Ole Kirk Christiansen was a humble carpenter from the small Danish town of Billund when he began making wooden toys for children in 1932. With Europe still in the grip of a depression and work as a carpenter hard to find, Christiansen's finely crafted toys proved hugely popular. In 1934 he formed his own company and named it Lego, a contraction of the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well."
In 1947 the company bought Denmark's- first plastic injection-molcfing machine and began to focus on plastic toys. By 1951 plastic toys made up half of the company's sales, although it was another eleven years until Ole, working with his son Godtfred, created the plastic blocks that became officially known as LEGO".
Christiansen had first made plastic interlocking blocks in 1949. These "Automatic Binding Bricks" were based on the Kiddicraft blocks made in 1947 in the United Kingdom, but were only sold in Denmark. By 1958 they had evolved into rectangular blocks made of cellulose acetate with grooves down each side. They were topped by a new stud-and-tube coupling system that gave the blocks greater stability when stacked, with the LEGO" name visible on the underside of each block. A legendary toy had arrived.
