LEGO is quite similar to stuffed animals. People from all ages and walks of life love it. But most people only know very little about it. Here’re some cool facts about LEGO you probably didn’t know.
For example LEGO is funding a LEGO Professorship of Play in education, development and learning in the University of Cambridge. This means you can become a real professor of LEGO. So what would a professor now? Lets see
20 things you didn’t know about LEGO
So for example, on average each person on the planet owns 86 LEGO bricks. We admit, we do own a little bit more than that…
LEGO is derived from the first two words of LEG and GODT which in Danish mean “play well”.
The LEGO brick was patented in January 1958 and the first ever LEGO mini figure was produced in 1978.
LEGO is actually the world largest manufacturer of tyres since they are rubber and used for many ot its figures. It makes more than Bridgestone, Goodyear and any other.
Just in 2012, LEGO produced 5.2 million bricks an hour. This adds up to 45.7 billion bricks for the whole year.
If you lay the bricks LEGO actually sold in 2012 end to end, they will go around the world more than 18 times.
If you stack LEGO bricks one on top of the other, you will need around 40 billion of them to reach the Moon.
The company actually started when Ole Kirk Christiansen lost his carpenter business and started making toys out of his surplus lumber, which became popular and helped set up the LEGO empire.
LEGO has never made military themed sets. Christiansen didn’t want to make war appealing to children.
LEGO did not create the idea for the bricks. That fame goes to Kiddicraft which made “Automatic Binding Bricks”, but LEGO improved on the design.
The first LEGO figurines had no facial features, no genger and no arms or moveable legs.
Up until 2013, a total of 560 billion LEGO parts were produced.
TV presenter James May and 1000 volunteers made a life size LEGO house in which you could live in. If you can handle stepping on LEGO bricks all the time. The houe took 3.3 million bricks.
There have been over 50 LEGO-themed video games and a movie with a sequel already in the works.
The company has turned the manufacturing process into an art and only 18 out of every one million LEGO pieces produces, fail the quality tests.
Every second, people around the world buy seven LEGO sets.
According to the documentary MegaFactories: LEGO, the possibilities for combining LEGO bricks are nearly endless. There are 915 million different ways to combine six individual LEGO bricks.
The largest LEGO set that you can buy is the Taj Mahal. It features a whopping 5922 pieces.
A total of 13 LEGO sets have went up into space to be tested how will handle in microgravity.
And finally, one that us arctophilles might not quite like, in 2000 The British Association of Toy Retailers namer LEGO the Toy of the Century. It beat out the Teddy Bear which came second and the Barbie doll.
