Ordinary Items Made From LEGO Blocks

The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (7 April 1891 – 11 March 1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company came to be called “LEGO”, from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means “play-well”.
It expanded to producing plastic toys in 1947. In 1949 Lego began producing the now famous interlocking bricks, calling them “Automatic Binding Bricks”. These bricks were based largely on the patentof Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which were released in the United Kingdom in 1947. LEGO modified the design of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample given to it by the British supplier of aninjection-molding machine that the company had purchased. The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate, were a development of traditional stackable wooden blocks that locked together by means of several round studs on top and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they required extraordinary effort to be separated.
The Lego Group’s motto is det bedste er ikke for godt which means roughly ‘only the best is good enough’ (more literally ‘the best is never too good’). This motto was created by Ole Kirk to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly. The motto is still used within the company today. The use of plastic for toy manufacture was not highly regarded by retailers and consumers of the time. Many of the Lego Group’s shipments were returned after poor sales; it was thought that plastic toys could never replace wooden ones.