Lego Patents Its Interlocking Brick

On 28 January 1958, the Lego Group submitted a patent application in Denmark for an altered interlocking toy brick. The enterprise had operated out of Billund since 1932, when carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen started producing wooden playthings. By 1934, Christiansen adopted the name Lego, drawn from the Danish phrase leg godt, which translates to play well. The business broadened its manufacturing in 1947 by acquiring an injection moulding machine and experimenting with plastics. In 1949, it began selling plastic Automatic Binding Bricks, early versions of the interlocking element fashioned from cellulose acetate.

These early blocks drew direct inspiration from Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which British toymaker Hilary Page had developed in the 1940s. According to the company's own history, Ole Kirk and Godtfred received plastic cubes from a British manufacturer in the late 1940s and redesigned them. Decades later, in 1981, Lego bought the rights to the Kiddicraft bricks from Page's descendants, for a sum widely reported as about 45,000 pounds. As plastic toys took a growing share of Lego's output in the early 1950s, some commentators were skeptical. One journalist asserted that plastics would never replace good, solid wooden toys.