Children's Toys Usually Go Through Phases Of Popularity And Many Disappear Without Trace Quite Quickly, But There Are Some Of Inventions Which Have Stood the Test Of Time And Keep On Going From Strength To Strength

For over half a century, both children and grown-ups around the world have spent many hours playing and creating things with Lego bricks. How much you can make with the bricks is limited only by how many you have and your own ideas. Though created as a children’s game, the product has many adult fans as well and a quick look on an internet search engine will locate some amazing and inventive designs.

Certain proof that its appeal doesn’t diminish as we grow up, the most incredible thing I’ve seen done with Lego was the human sized two storey house, complete with a fully operational bathroom and a bed which TV star James May stated was the worst bed he had ever gone to sleep in. I must be honest here that I may have toned down the colour scheme for the house a little, or I believe I’d have been wearing sunglasses in the house and needing Laser eye surgery to stop my eyes from hurting too much! Building an object so huge could obviously only be pulled off with loads of help and a large sum of money, but the human imagination can dream up some fantastic creations even with only a limited number of bricks available to use.

The Lego story began in 1932 in a quiet town in Denmark where a man named Ole Kirk Christansen started a factory producing wooden toys for children. He asked his workers to come up with a title for the company, but in the end came up with one himself by merging the Danish words ‘Leg’ and Godt’, meaning ‘Play Well’, an ideal name if ever there was one!

He soon discovered that plastic was much more durable than wood when used in toy production, and purchased in the pioneering first injection moulding machine ever employed in Denmark. He began experimenting with plastic building bricks and in 1949 he developed the prototype for Lego bricks. The concept was launched onto the market in 1958, and even though there have clearly been a lot of additions to the original product in terms of colours and shapes, the size of the bricks has always stayed consistent enough that Lego pieces bought today would still fit together perfectly with the original 1958 bricks.

Today, Lego products are manufactured in Denmark, Mexico and the Czech Republic and all factories must conform to the same extremely high quality standards which ensure that the pieces across the globe will always click together and stay together exactly. The margin of tolerance for the size of the bricks is so miniscule as to be virtually unimaginable to the human brain. The variances which are acceptable are in fact so small that I must assume that they are checked by something like a Laser eye beam and computer software to ensure such consistency.

The Lego business is one of the biggest toy manufacturers on the planet based on profit, and employs around 4,500 staff. At the end of the 1900s it won awards in both the USA and the UK as the ‘Toy Of The Century’ and I don’t think that there are many individuals who would disagree with that accolade.

There are supposed to be 2,400 different Lego pieces, which is an incredible amount of shapes, sizes and colours! Of course, in the 21st Century, a lot of the Lego purchased is in kit form and is designed to result in specific objects ranging from a fortress to a helicopter, a pirate ship to a space rocket and much more besides. Many of the kits are tied in with films or television shows, so, for example, you can make something like your own Star Wars universe, including a lot of the characters, spacecraft, droids and even Mos Eisley Cantina! Although even Lego’s imaginative creators are yet to work out how to get the lightsabers to give out a genuine Laser eye beam!

For folk who want to build Lego scenes which are more realistic, there is the City collection of kits, which enables you to create all of the buildings, vehicles and people you need for your urban district – police, fire brigade, the airport, trains, farms and much more so that you can put out the flames of fires, fly planes and arrest people. I bet, given time, you’ll even have kits that allow you to remove a Lego appendix, carry out Lego Laser eye surgery or pull out Lego teeth!

I used to think that advertising so many kits was a bit of a pity. I often wondered how much they have deprived today’s children of their ability to make use of their own imaginations to come up with unique shapes and models. But now I’ve changed my opinion and believe that the kits are fine provided nobody says that they must be fitted together as demonstrated on the box. For example, look at a wheel and work out how many other objects are that kind of shape. You’ll soon realise that the human imagination is way more inventive than you think!