Legos®

U.S. 3,005,282, issued October 21, 1961

In 1932, master carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen established a small business in the village of Billund, Denmark, manufacturing stepladders, ironing boards and wooden toys.  Two years later, focusing on the toys, he named the business LEGO, from the Danish "LEg GOdt" for "play well".

An early adopter of plastic injection molding, LEGO developed its Automatic Binding Bricks in the 1950s, the now familiar plastic interlocking LEGO blocks patented in the United States in 1961.  The bricks enabled the “LEGO System of Play", originally comprising 28 sets and 8 vehicles with extra parts available.  This revolutionary new approach to toys allowed the owner to expand and create without a strict set of guidelines to follow, fostering creativity.

In the years since their introduction, LEGOs have been enormously successful.  Today, approximately 20 billion LEGO pieces are manufactured each year and LEGOs have fostered the creativity of more than 300 million children.  Indeed, there are few inventors alive today who have not played with LEGOs at one time or another.