Completely Random Facts About LEGO

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We played with them as kids, and now they’re a great excuse to have kids, as long as you don’t step on them in the middle of the night (the LEGO bricks, not the kids). They’ve been delighting (and frustrating) millions of people for decades, and they have an endless array of possibilities. Here’s a look into the amazing world of LEGO.

The LEGO name comes from the Danish phrase, “leg godt,” which means, “play well.”

The LEGO Company was started in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Billund, Denmark. The company was handed down to one of his sons, Godtfred, after he died in 1958. LEGO bricks were launched in that year.

Christiansen was a master carpenter whose workshop burned down twice. During the Great Depression, when nobody could afford real furniture, he started making small wooden toys. In 1947, Christiansen bought the first plastic injection molding machine, which later made the first bricks. This was a huge financial gamble that could have bankrupted the company.

The famous LEGO brick was patented on January 28, 1958, and all 2x4 bricks are produced to this standard today.

The total number of LEGO minifigures produced has crossed 9 billion. That means there are officially more plastic “minifigs” on Earth than there are real, living humans.

When the iconic LEGO “minifig” was introduced in 1978, Ole Kirk Christiansen’s grandson, Kjeld, specified that the figures should have yellow skin, no noses, and no fingers or toes so they would remain racially and ethnically neutral. He wanted children of any background to be able to imagine themselves as the character.

More than one trillion LEGO pieces have been produced since 1958, and there is an average of over 120 LEGO pieces for every person on the planet.

LEGO is the world’s largest tire manufacturer by volume, producing over 300 million tiny rubber tires every single year.

If you take just six 2x4 LEGO bricks to build with, they can be combined in 915,103,765 different combinations.

Each LEGO mini-figure is exactly four bricks tall.

The bricks produced today will still interlock with the bricks produced in 1958.

Only 18 LEGO bricks in every million produced fail to meet the company’s standard of accuracy of two thousandths of a millimeter.

In Budapest, Hungary, the world’s tallest LEGO tower was constructed on May 25, 2014, from 450,000 bricks and rose to a height of 114 feet. It was topped with a Hungarian-built Rubik’s Cube.

James May of Surrey, Great Britain, made the world’s first full-size house made entirely out of LEGO bricks; 3.3 million bricks to be exact. The house took 1,200 volunteers over a month to build and was demolished shortly after that. The bricks were then donated to charity. The building of the house was done for May’s television series, James May’s Toy Stories. You may recognize May’s name if you’ve ever seen the UK version (and original) Top Gear. He was one of the program’s co-hosts.

Gaius Cornelius/Wikimedia

In Billund, Denmark, LEGO maintains a maximum-security vault, which contains an unopened copy of nearly every single LEGO set ever manufactured since the 1950s.

According to Warner Bros. Pictures, to make The LEGO Movie, the creators used a total of 3,863,484 LEGO bricks, combined with computer animation. To make the entire film would have required 15,080,330 bricks, making the filming cost prohibitive.

The LEGO company is famously protective about its trademark. They insist that “LEGO” is an adjective, not a noun, and the plural is always “LEGO bricks” or “LEGO sets.”

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