Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building - TIME

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By LEO CENDROWICZ Monday, Jan. 28, 2008

Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building

0

Playing with legoMARCUS BRANDT / AFP / Getty

For devotees, Monday sees the 50th anniversary of an event inCopenhagen that transformed toys and revolutionized childhooditself.

It was at 1:58 p.m. on January 28, 1958, that then-Lego headGodtfred Kirk Christiansen filed a patent for the iconic plasticbrick with its stud-and-hole design. Since then, the company hasmade a staggering 400 billion Lego elements, or 62 bricks forevery person on the planet. And if stacked on top of one another,the pieces would form 10 towers reaching all the way from theEarth to the Moon.

But Lego's legacy lies less in numbers than in its creativeinfluence. The colorful bricks have littered playroom floors forgenerations of families. But they have also spurred ingenuityamong children that few toys can claim before and since. Thecompany has always emphasized the importance of free-formplay, and Lego's popularity can be attributed to the amount ofimagination children use to build with the bricks.

The Lego company was founded in 1932 by Danish carpenter OleKirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund who had a sideline inwooden toys. He named the company after an amalgamation ofthe Danish phrase "leg godt," which means "play well."

The basic eight-stud red Lego brick was first sold in Denmark in1949. But it took a further nine years for Ole Kirk's son, GodtfredKirk, to file the patent for the versatile "Automatic BindingBrick" with its interlocking 2x4 studs. The plastic bricks are part

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Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building - TIME

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of a unique system: tiny tubes inside give the knobs on top ofother blocks more places to grip. They hold together well but canbe taken apart easily by a child. And consistency has been key:the bricks produced today have the same bumps and holes, andcan still interlock with those produced back in 1958. Fifty yearson and the Lego Group is the world's fifth largest toymaker interms of sales, after Mattel, Hasbro, Bandai and MGAEntertainment.

Over the years, the Lego group has built up the brand. Itdeveloped the larger Duplo series in the 1960s for youngerchildren who had trouble handling the original tiny Lego bricks(Duplo is still going strong too). In 1968, the company opened itsfirst Legoland theme parks, near its Billund birthplace. Parks inWindsor, England, Carlsbad, California and Günzburg, Germanyfollowed, each using around 50 million bricks to create replicasof monuments and landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, MountRushmore, and the Sydney Opera House. Each park receivesaround 1.4 million visitors per year.

But over the past decade, the group has struggled to keep pacewith changing toy trends: the basic plastic bricks find itparticularly tough to compete with games consoles like XBox andPlayStation to attract kids' attention. After years of eroding sales,the company posted its first-ever losses in 1998.

Radical remedies were needed to restore the brick's reputation.Tie-ins helped: the company's link-up with Star Wars revivedthe brand, and even led to its own video games: Lego Star WarsII sold 1.1 million units in its first week of release in 2006. If youcan't beat 'em, join 'em, it would seem.

In recent years, a series of brutal job cuts, asset sales and cost-cutting measures have pruned the company down. Staff numbershave fallen from 6,000 in 2004 to some 4,500 today. TheLegoland parks were sold in 2005 to Merlin Entertainments, partof the Blackstone private equity group, which owns MadameTussauds and Sea Life. And critically, distribution, packagingand production has been outsourced to Eastern Europe andMexico. As a result, the Lego Group turned a $374 million lossin 2004 into a $281 million profit in 2006.

The group itself is only planning low-key celebrations of thepatent anniversary: a special-edition of its 1950s-style Town Planset with three gold bricks, and a worldwide building contest witha grand finale at Legoland Billund. And for most Google users —itself a website which keeps building and growing in size — thehomepage spelling of the company name in Lego blocks Mondaywill come across as just another of the web giant's quirks. But forthe millions who grew up on the brick — and the millions morestill fitting them together — that lunchtime visit to the patentoffice proved priceless.

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