Free LEGO by Jonathan Bender

pile of detailed parts. It’s completely different from the tub of bricks that my parents bought me as a child in the 1980s. Maybe I don’t know much about detail building because it wasn’t possible to build such intricate models when I was growing up. The play themes (castle, space) had just been introduced, and minifigures had only a single expression of simple happiness. LEGO was simpler then.
    Yet LEGO in the 1980s would have seemed fantastic to the children who played with the first wooden toys to come out of the toy shop launched by Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1932.
    That year, Ole Kirk’s life was at a crossroads. His first wife, Kristine, had died giving birth to their fourth son, Gerhardt.
    “Life is a gift, but also a challenge,” Ole Kirk, a devout Christian, is said to have remarked around that time.
    At forty-one years of age, he was a widower living in the largest house in Billund, Denmark—a house that he soon might not be able to afford. The Great Depression meant that demand had dried up for the stools, Christmas tree bases, and ironing boards that were the trademarks of his carpentry and joinery shop. The last three houses he had built were sitting unsold.
    Ole Kirk guessed that even in times of financial strife, people would still be willing to buy wooden toys for their children. His shop, already known for producing wooden blocks, was given a new name: LEGO. The name was a shortened combination of the Danish words leg and godt, meaning “play well.” (It later would be noted that the Latin word lego means “I assemble,” or “I put together,” a fact apparently unknown to OKC.)
    The new name and toys debuted in 1934 at the Danish Trade Exhibition, the same year Ole Kirk remarried, wedding his house-keeper, Kirsten Sofie Jorgensen. The product line grew dramatically in 1937, when Ole Kirk purchased a wooden router, allowing him to build ducks, ships, and trains. At that time, wooden toys were seen as innovative, high-quality gifts for children, slowly eclipsing the tin tractors and mechanical toys from Germany that had dominated the market. Just five years later, LEGO officially became a family business, with Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, Ole Kirk’s third son, working alongside his father.
    The success of the wooden toys allowed Ole Kirk Christiansen to purchase an injection-molding machine in 1946, the first in Denmark. Less than three years later, LEGO had a catalog of close to two hundred different wooden and plastic toys that for the first time included bricks.
    But these early “automatic binding bricks” were made of wood, and were available only in Denmark. Plastic bricks wouldn’t be produced until 1953. LEGO applied for and received its first trademark a year later. The bricks were sold in barbershops as either singles or by the pack—packaged in a small box so that children could buy a brick just as Daddy bought a single smoke or a pack of cigarettes.
    Godtfred had been toying with the concept of a system of play, in which all of the toys that LEGO produced in a given line could be used together. He settled on the plastic bricks, believing they offered the possibility for modular building. The LEGO System of Play began in 1955 and included twenty-eight different sets and eight vehicles.
    Those initial bricks could stack, but they didn’t lock together. So LEGO developed the stud and tube system to improve the clutch power of the toy. The first molds made twenty-four 2 × 4 brightly colored plastic bricks. The iconic 2 × 4 brick was granted a patent in 1958, the same year that LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen died.
    As the company expanded in western Europe with a large presence in Germany and Britain, Godtfred looked to sell LEGO toys in the United States. LEGO partnered with Samsonite Corporation in Denver, Colorado, granting them a distribution license from 1961 to 1972. The large-scale DUPLO blocks for preschoolers debuted in 1967, and ten years later, those onetime toddlers