Even More Trivia: LEGO

Today's trivia is all about LEGO and some of the interesting things people have done with it.

History

The LEGO company was not called LEGO to start with. It was founded in the early 1930's as a carpentry business, and later moves into wooden toys, they take on the name LEGO from Leg Godt "Play well" in Danish and establish a motto of "Only the best is good enough".

In 1942 their factory producing wooden toys burned down. However they seemed to bounce back from this setback quickly. The first patent for a LEGO brick we recognize today was issued in 1958, but the company had been building a brick system before that and finally settling on a plastic style brick.

Automatic Binding Brick design around 1950

Scale of Production

LEGO Facts

There is a lot of LEGO in the world. In 2012, 45.7 billion LEGO bricks were produced in a single year at a rate of 5.2 million per hour.

The modern manufacturing process for LEGO operates on huge and almost completely automated scale.

A video detailing the entire manufacturing process

Large silos store coloured plastic granules in huge quantities.
The plastic is melted at 232 degrees C and injected into a mold before cooling and storing in a tub.
Robotic vehicles travel the factory collecting the filled boxes for storage.
LEGO kits are made up from the stored blocks (by hand? uncertain.)

There are currently around 4,200 different parts or elements in the current LEGO range.

Minifigures

Boba Fett from the Star Wars Cloud City LEGO set is one of rarest and most collectable minifigures ever created.

Minifigures are the little characters in LEGO.

First developed in 1978 and exactly four blocks high (without a hat) they are made in a similar automatic fashion.
LEGO designers chose the color yellow to best represent all races and ethnicities.
An estimated 4 billion have been made – making it the world’s largest population group!