How LEGO Rebuilt the Toy Itself

Summary

HISTORY This Week — How LEGO Rebuilt the Toy Itself

Episode Date: October 13, 2025
Host: Ben Dickstein (The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios)
Key Guests: Christian Reimer Haug (LEGO corporate historian), Daniel Konstansky (Blocks Magazine Historian), Chris Byrne (The Toy Guy)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the transformational story of LEGO — from its humble beginnings as a small carpentry shop in Denmark to its global status as a toy empire. Through on-location storytelling, interviews with historians, and behind-the-scenes peeks, the episode unravels how a shift from wooden toys to the innovative “LEGO System in Play” changed not just LEGO, but the toy industry at large. Central to the story is how LEGO made the audacious decision to create a toy that never becomes obsolete — with each new purchase complementing what the child already owns. The result: a modular, durable, and endlessly creative system that inaugurated a new philosophy in play.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: From Carpentry to Toys

• Location & Atmosphere ([03:21–07:16])
  Ben Dickstein travels to Billund, Denmark — the “quiet” town where LEGO was born.
  • The LEGO Museum houses a 1950s “Town Plan,” pivotal in LEGO’s evolution.
  • Christian Reimer Haug describes early playsets:

    “The bricks you bought yesterday…fit with the ones you buy today, and they will also fit with the ones you buy tomorrow.” ([06:52])

• Founding Story
  • Ole Kirk Christiansen, born 1891, starts as a carpenter and purchases a struggling woodshop in Billund.
  • The Great Depression leads to a shift — Ole identifies a growing demand for simple, quality toys as a comfort during hardship.
  • “When times are tough, parents tend to want to protect their children a little bit… so that they can play and maybe forget about the realities a little bit.” —Christian Reimer Haug ([10:16])

2. Birth of the LEGO Brand ([11:22–12:03])

• Naming the Company
  • Internal contest for naming fails; Ole combines Danish words lego ("play well"); coincidentally, in Latin lego also means “I assemble.”
• Early Products
  • Wooden toys dominate early years: ducks, animals, and miscellaneous playful creations.
  • The emphasis is always on quality and durability — a standard that shapes LEGO's future.

3. Disaster and Reinvention: War, Fire, and Plastic ([13:06–18:14])

• Resilience Through Adversity
  • Factory burns down in 1942; Ole rebuilds and eyes new materials for the future.
• Advent of Plastic Toys
  • Due to wartime scarcity of quality wood, Ole investigates new plastic molding technology.
  • Among first in Denmark to import a plastic injection molding machine, producing the earliest plastic "automatic binding bricks" in 1949.

4. Innovation of the LEGO “System in Play” ([21:06–26:55])

• Systemic Thinking
  • Godtfred Kirk Christiansen (Ole’s son) conceives the system during a pivotal conversation with department store buyer Truls Petersen:

    “There’s just no system in toys. Can I create a system of toys?” —Christian Reimer Haug ([23:19])

  • Godtfred formulates “Principles of Play”: toys should be modular, affordable, durable, for both boys and girls, and always compatible.
  • “It’s really more a way to think about how we generate ideas for toys, how we approach the products, that it was kind of a system of thought.” —Daniel Konstansky ([24:27])
• The Town Plan (1955)
  • The 1955 Town Plan becomes the first product demonstration of this system — a scale city, endlessly expandable with new sets.

5. The Final Piece: Clutch Power ([26:55–31:36])

• Need for Interlocking Bricks
  • Early bricks lack “clutch power”; their poor stability frustrates both designers and children.
  • Gottfred and engineer Axel Thomsen invent the now-familiar tubes inside the bricks, patented in 1958, creating the satisfying, stable connection:

    “When we get that, the tubes inside, they will stick. That’s just a very, very lovely sound…” —Christian Reimer Haug ([30:19])

6. Legacy and Global Expansion ([31:36–33:38])

• Growth and Innovation
  • Following Ole’s death in 1958, Godtfred leads LEGO through its golden age: inclusion of wheels (1961), expansion to global markets, the first minifigures (1978), Legoland, computer games, movies.
• Endurance of the System
  • The system philosophy runs deep. LEGO's product development is “unbelievably rigorous,” ensuring every new piece continues to work with all others, old and new.

    “The LEGO group has an almost religious fervor in terms of every part works with every other part…” —Daniel Konstansky ([32:24])

  • The ongoing euphoria in play is by design:

    “They want to make this playground, this walled garden, so perfect that…you don’t even think about it.” —Daniel Konstansky ([33:27])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Imagination and Reality:

  “Having that mirror to the outside society is something we have seen in the entire course of our history.” —Christian Reimer Haug ([05:27])

• On the System in Play:

  “The bricks you bought yesterday, they fit with the ones you buy today, and they will also fit with the ones you buy tomorrow.” —Christian Reimer Haug ([06:52])

• On Product Philosophy:

  “It’s really more a way to think about how we generate ideas for toys, how we approach the products…” —Daniel Konstansky ([24:27])

• On the Value of Persistence:

  “Making mistakes, learning from them will lead you to the best end result.” —Christian Reimer Haug ([11:58])

• On Modern LEGO’s System Rigidity:

  “The process…to design new elements is unbelievably rigorous. They’ll design every permutation in the family of elements.” —Daniel Konstansky ([32:24])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• LEGO Factory and Museum Introduction: [03:21–07:16]
• Origins and Early Years: [07:16–13:06]
• Fire, War, and Move to Plastic: [13:06–18:14]
• Development of the Brick and “System in Play”: [21:06–26:55]
• Clutch Power and LEGO’s Unique Patent: [29:14–30:55]
• Expansion, Minifigure, and Modern Legacy: [31:36–33:38]

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Conclusion: LEGO’s Lasting Blueprint

This episode captures not only the story of a toy, but also an enduring lesson in innovation from adversity, systemic thinking, and the kind of inclusive design that allows creativity to flourish across generations. LEGO's reinvention wasn't just about changing its materials, but about fundamentally rebuilding what a toy could mean, setting a blueprint for products and play that persists to this day.

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Special Thanks:
Christian Reimer Haug (LEGO Idea House), Daniel Konstansky (Blocks Magazine), Chris Byrne (The Toy Guy)
Production credits: Ben Dickstein (Host/Producer), Sally Helm (Story Editor), and the team at Back Pocket Studios.

Transcript

[Ben Dickstein]

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[Christian Reimer Haug]

The History Channel Original Podcast.

[Ben Dickstein]

History this week October 1955 I'm Ben Dickstein. So for our regular listeners, I want to note up top that I'm normally behind the scenes producing, but recently I got the opportunity to go to Denmark, specifically Billund, Denmark, to visit the world headquarters of lego. This is the LEGO factory. Sorry, I don't have to yell. This is the Lego factory where 20 billion Lego bricks and parts are produced every year. The factory floor has dozens of these platforms, plastic injection molding machines, basically shooting hot plastic into the shape of various LEGO elements, letting them cool off and then dropping them onto conveyor belts which feed into these huge bins full of lego. Just a short drive away from the factory in this small Danish town, there's a LEGO museum featuring some of the company's earliest plastic bricks. Featured in this exhibit, a 1950s miniature Lego model of a little town.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

The models here will be a mix of some that were introduced all the way back in 55, and some that are introduced a little bit.

[Ben Dickstein]

Christian Reimer Haug, LEGO company historian, took me through this museum. Glass cases displaying dozens and dozens of models from the company's history. But this little LEGO town from the 1950s, it might be the most important thing here.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

The houses, the trees, the little bicycles and cars, everything fits in scale.

[Ben Dickstein]

A 1:87 scale to be exact. And this LEGO set, which is called the Town Plan, it really captures kids imaginations. Back in the 1950s, you know, children.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Learn about their surroundings by mirror themselves in their surroundings. So having, you know, a car that looks like the car that your parents have, then you can play that you are driving to work just as your parents are, and so on. Or maybe you want to create the town that you wished you lived in. But having that mirror to the outside society is something we have seen in the entire course of our history.

[Ben Dickstein]

At first LEGO made wooden toys, not the plastic bricks they'd be famous for. But this little 1950s town marks a big shift. Right next to where this LEGO town is displayed in the museum, there's a typed up document framed on the wall, it's a company announcement from 1955 to.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Our customers saying, we have something important to share with you. We have this fantastic idea. The LEGO system in play.

[Ben Dickstein]

The LEGO system in play. This is the innovation, the idea of a toy city itself. That's not really a big deal. Other companies have done something like that before. The change here is that this isn't a toy that you buy and play with and then throw away. Instead, each time you buy this toy, it adds to what you've already got.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

The bricks you bought yesterday, they fit with the ones you buy today, and they will also fit with the ones you buy tomorrow. You can always build bricks together, no matter if they're 50 years apart.

[Ben Dickstein]

The idea that you never have to throw the toy away. It's nice and all, but it's not obvious that this would be profitable. But in reality, this decision transformed a small Danish company into an international powerhouse. Today, the story of Lego. How did a small town Danish carpenter end up starting a plastic toy empire? And how did Lego re envision what a toy can be? The LEGO Museum is actually part of one of the first buildings the company ever constructed. Here, off to the side, there's an office, preserved as it was decades ago. It belonged to Lego's founder, Ole Kirk.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Christiansen, and we actually right now are surrounded by some of his old office furniture.

[Ben Dickstein]

LEGO historian Christian Reimer Haug sat down with me in Ole Christiansen's old office and and told me the story of how this curious carpenter started a toy empire. Ole was born in 1891 in the Danish countryside, not far from the town of Billund.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

He's from a very large family. He has 12 brothers and sisters. And he is apprenticed as a carpenter, actually by one of his older brothers who had a carpentry shop in a neighboring town.

[Ben Dickstein]

He has a knack for woodworking. He plies his craft in Germany and Norway for a while. Then he marries, starts a family.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

And then he sees that the woodworkshop here in Billund is for sale and he buys it.

[Ben Dickstein]

But the town of Billund isn't exactly thriving. One writer describes it as a godforsaken railway stopping point where nothing could possibly thrive. But Oleg Kirk Kristiansen builds up his small carpentry shop over the next decade so, until 1929, the Great Depression. It hits Denmark just as hard as anywhere else.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

He loses his customers. They cannot afford to buy his carpentry services.

[Ben Dickstein]

The business is in free fall.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

And just sort of, to top all of that off, he also loses his wife. So he's suddenly alone with, at that point in time, four boys aged six to 15. So we have a carpenter here who is looking to see how can I put food on the table for my boys.

[Ben Dickstein]

Money is scarce, not just for the Christiansens, but for the whole town of Billund. So Ole starts trading his products rather than selling them with other people in town. A wooden stool for a bag of vegetables. He's also making little wooden animals and race cars to trade. And he starts to notice parents sometimes want these toys over the items that might seem more practical.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Something we have seen over and over again in the course of our history, that when times are tough, parents tend to want to protect their children a little bit. They want to get them some new toys once in a while so that they can play and maybe forget about the realities a little bit.

[Ben Dickstein]

This growing interest in toys also drives home another important business practice, maintaining quality.

[Daniel Konstansky]

In the 30s, when he was starting this business of kind of going door to door and trying to sell these wares.

[Ben Dickstein]

Daniel Konstansky is historian for Blocks magazine.

[Daniel Konstansky]

You know, there was nothing there. I mean, you've been there. It's small now. Back then it was. I mean, this poor man was walking miles upon miles to a very small subset of potential customers. Like, you know, one mistake, one lack of quality product, and they would remember.

[Ben Dickstein]

Apparently Christensen is able to maintain these standards because the toys are a hit. So he decides to lean into this side of the business. And now his company needs a new name.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

If I am now a toy manufacturer, then Bilon Wood Workshop might not be the most catchy name. Let's see if we can come up with a better name, Ole tells his.

[Ben Dickstein]

Small team of employees. Whoever comes up with the best name for this toy company gets a bottle of my homemade wine. He does not like any of the suggestions.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Don't.

[Ben Dickstein]

No one wins the contest. But in 1934, he invents a name on his own, combining the two Danish words laig and gott, meaning play well. Unbeknownst to Ole, Lego is also a Latin word. Its translation I assemble.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Making mistakes, learning from them will lead you to the best end result.

[Ben Dickstein]

Over in the Lego exhibit down the hall from Ole's office, Christian shows me some of the wooden toys Lego starts to produce in these early years. Doll carriages, yo yos. But mostly animals. Elephants, squirrels, rabbits and ducks. Lots of ducks.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

We have had many, many different wooden ducks.

[Ben Dickstein]

Most of these ducks look like mallards, I think. I don't know. I'm not a duck expert, but I can say that they definitely don't have feet. They're mainly on wheels.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

When you pull them along, they will open and close the mouth, the beacon. And some of them could also actually make like a quack sound. My favorite product in this entire exhibition is right here. It's some sort of ladybug, I guess, with very big feet and pants and thin, wobbly arms. And I love it so much because I've been looking at this product for 15 years. I've been working here for 15 years. I still have no clue what's going.

[Ben Dickstein]

On over the next few years. Heading into the 1940s, Lego does pretty well. It's a solid family business. Ole is getting his sons involved too. But then they have to adapt again. World War II comes to Denmark. It's occupied by the Nazis for nearly the entire war. And they cut off most imports, which actually leads to increased demand for the LEGO company. Remember, the Depression showed that when times are tough, toys are still important. And the company is meeting this new demand. Until it's some sort of electricity malfunction.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

And the whole workshop was destroyed by fire.

[Ben Dickstein]

On March 10, 1942, the Lego Workshop burns to the ground. Insurance doesn't cover the loss. It is a devastating setback. But in hindsight, it presents an opportunity. A fresh start. A brand new red brick factory is built over the next year. And it's still standing. You could see it from the window of Ole's office. This new factory lets the company churn out wooden toys by the hundreds. And it becomes clear that LEGO is ready to evolve. Take the next step.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

We do see Ole being curious when it comes to introducing a new material.

[Ben Dickstein]

A new material. Plastic. Hey, everyone, this is Ben from the History this Week team. All through history, people have searched for ways to understand the mind. From ancient philosophers debating the soul to Freud sketching theories in Vienna. Today, we know a lot more about how our brains work. But getting help can still feel like it's stuck in another century. That's why I like Rula. Taking care of your mental health shouldn't be harder than taking care of your body. Pull a muscle, you see a doctor feeling anxious, burnt out or stuck. That's where Rula comes in. Rula makes therapy simple, affordable and fast. They work with most major insurance plans, and the average session copay is just 15 bucks about the price of lunch. You answer a few quick questions, and Rula matches you with a licensed, vetted therapist who actually fits your needs. You could be talking to someone as soon as tomorrow. Rula isn't just a directory. They stick with you, help you schedule, and make sure you're making Progress. With over 15,000 therapists and psychiatrists nationwide, you're not rolling the dice. For me, therapy's been a huge help, especially in the middle of tight deadlines or under creative pressure. It's where I can slow down, clear my head, and actually make sense of things. I've had moments where I've thought, I'll deal with this later and later turn into months. Having an easy way to talk about stress, like with Rula, would have made a big difference. Thousands of guys have already used Rula to finally get the care they needed. Don't keep putting it off. Go to rula.com htw and get started today. That's R U L A.com htw take the first step, get connected and take control of your mental health. What's up guys? It's Candice Dillard Bassett, former Real Housewife of Potomac.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

And I'm Michael Arseneault, author of the New York Times bestseller I Can't Date Jesus.

[Ben Dickstein]

And this is undomesticated, the podcast where we aren't just saying the quiet parts out loud. We're putting it all on the kitchen table and inviting you to the function. If you're ready for some bold takes and a little bit of chaos, welcome to Undomesticated. Follow and listen to undomesticated, available wherever you get your podcasts.

[Daniel Konstansky]

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[Ben Dickstein]

As World War II rages, raw materials start to run thin.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

In Denmark, we are actually struggling finding enough high quality wood.

[Ben Dickstein]

Wood, which if you're a wooden toy company, is pretty important. But a new technology has emerged with the war plastic. It's used in combat to make things like telephones and radios. And on the home front, plastic is used in buttons, handles, cups and plates. So Ole decides he's going to check it out for himself.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

He attends some demonstrations of these plastic injection molding machines and he is really, really intrigued. And he can see that this material has reached a quality that is very suitable for toy production.

[Ben Dickstein]

Daniel Konstansky says after the war Ole orders what will be one of the first plastic injection molding machines in all of Denmark.

[Daniel Konstansky]

You know, to pull handle, get toy, Pull handle, get toy, pull handle, get toy. There's gotta be some part of him that saw that and was like, wow.

[Ben Dickstein]

The machine comes from the United Kingdom. And along with it we some samples to show what it can do. One of them was designed by a man named Hilary Fisher Page for his toy company, Kiddicraft. It's called the self Locking building brick. It's one of many construction toys on the market.

[Daniel Konstansky]

There is a history of block based toys, whether they are wood and even some in early plastic. We have examples of them popping up, you know, in different places.

[Ben Dickstein]

There's Kiddicraft in the uk, Bill Dobrik in the US among others. So you might be asking yourself, did Ole Kirk Christiansen steal the idea for the LEGO brick? Daniel Konstansky says, absolutely not.

[Daniel Konstansky]

If I had $5 for every time I've seen an article claiming they're like, oh, LEGO stole the idea for the brick. I go out for a very nice dinner every night this week and I don't see it that way at all. Right. We always put those types of stories through our modern context. You know, this was rural Denmark. All these types of things were kind of popping up and there were ideas that people built off of each other in this toy industry all over the place. It may not have been the type of thing where, you know, Ole Kirk popped up in bed at night and was like, oh, I have this brilliant idea that no one else has ever thought of and that I have not seen any examples of ever. But in terms of the iteration and all that, those types of ideas always evolve.

[Ben Dickstein]

Ole Kirk Christiansen, seeing these plastic bricks out in the marketplace, thinks he can make one too. Maybe one that's even better. So in 1949, he introduces Lego's first plastic brick.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Automatic binding brick is the name of our first plastic brick.

[Ben Dickstein]

But they only bind in the loosest sense of the word.

[Daniel Konstansky]

So really what those early bricks were was kind of guided stacking where you could put those, you know, you could put them on, they wouldn't slide off of each other.

[Ben Dickstein]

These stacking, binding bricks come in small packages of red, white, yellow and green that let you build something like a house with some windows and doors, but if you flipped this creation upside down, it would fall apart.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

You can build these simple square houses and so on with bricks like that, but yes, they, they will tend to fall apart easily because of that lack of the ability to to stick together at first.

[Ben Dickstein]

This brick is just one of many products Lego is still making wooden toys and other plastic toys.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

That is one product out of 260 plus products in our portfolio.

[Ben Dickstein]

But the humble brick starts climbing up the sales charts by 1952. The automatic binding bricks that don't exactly bind account for half of the company's profits. But there's competition, especially in the construction toy space.

[Daniel Konstansky]

We have things like the Erector set which was steel girders. At the same time McKenna was being.

[Ben Dickstein]

Made in France, which was virtually the same toy. That's Chris Byrne, an author and historian, professionally known as the Toy Guy Tinker.

[Daniel Konstansky]

Toy, which was rods and spools invented by Charles Pageau. The other one, Lincoln Logs, which was created by Frank Lloyd Wright's son.

[Ben Dickstein]

The competition is stiff. LEGO bricks don't really have a unique place in the global toy market. They'd have to find a way to stand out. It's January of 1954 and Ole's son Godfred Kirk Christiansen is on a ferry in the North Sea. He helps run the family business and he's on his way to England for a toy fair.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Godfather strikes up conversation with people from the Danish toy industry. And one particular conversation with a guy called Truls Petersen.

[Ben Dickstein]

Truls Petersen is a buyer for Magasin du Nord, Copenhagen's largest department store. And like colleagues do, trolls is complaining.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

He's fed up with the toy market. It's so fragmentated and he struggles making beautiful window displays because nothing fits in scale. It's a little bit of this, a little bit of that and says there's just no system in toys. And that really triggers Godfell. Things that fit together. The tendency that Torus was talking about is that you buy something, you play with it, you throw it out, you buy something new, you play with that, throw it out. Don't really combine what you have. And that's just keeps on repeating in, in his head. He said that in, in interviews later on that, you know, I couldn't get it out of my head. You know, there's no system. Can I create a system of toys?

[Ben Dickstein]

When he returns to Billund, Gottfred gets to work on this question. Which of Lego's toys is the best candidate to make a system? What does a system even look like?

[Christian Reimer Haug]

He lines up all of these 260 plus products and goes through everything. And the one product he feels has the possibility of becoming a system are the hollow plastic bricks. And that in 1955 become the Lego system in play.

[Ben Dickstein]

There are two sides to the system in play. According to Daniel Konstansky, the first is more philosophical.

[Daniel Konstansky]

You need to bring a system to how you think about toys as a product.

[Ben Dickstein]

Godfred literally sits down and writes what he calls his principles of play. That the toys are limited in size, but allow for a huge amount of imagination. That they're affordable, durable for both boys and girls.

[Daniel Konstansky]

That it is always applicable. Which is an incredible insight to have had that long ago.

[Ben Dickstein]

Right.

[Daniel Konstansky]

And that absolutely played out because, you know, LEGO bricks keep finding new application and new popularity in each subsequent generation. So he laid down these kind of principles. It's really more a way to think about how we generate ideas for toys, how we approach the products, that it was kind of a system of thought.

[Ben Dickstein]

Then there's the other side of the system, the toy itself. That all LEGO components will work together. And that's best demonstrated by the first LEGO system product, launched in October 1955, that town plan.

[Daniel Konstansky]

You've got the maps and you've got the buildings that go on it, and you've got the little figures that are scaled to it. And every subsequent product is designed that same way. It's all designed to work together as a system.

[Ben Dickstein]

The town plan has houses and trees and stores. It's all laid out on a plastic grid of roads. There are cars, too. They're made of metal, though the bricks still don't bind tightly enough for something moving around on wheels. But for a toy, you could say this town is pretty accurate.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

There are street signs so that you could also learn about traffic rules, you know, learning through play. And there's just one thing lacking still.

[Ben Dickstein]

What is that? Stability. The bricks still don't really stick together, and no one at Lego seems to know how to make it happen. This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, Real United Airlines customers.

[Daniel Konstansky]

We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kathryn Andrews.

[Ben Dickstein]

I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Daniel Konstansky]

I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[Ben Dickstein]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.

[Daniel Konstansky]

That's how good leads the way.

[Ben Dickstein]

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[Christian Reimer Haug]

Now.

[Ben Dickstein]

The LEGO system is out in the world and it takes the Danish toy market by storm. Trolls Peterson, that buyer who talked about the system on that ferry boat 13 months earlier. He gives the town plan a lavish ground floor display at his department store in Copenhagen. The company's brick sales double by 1956. Then they double again the year after and again the year after that. It looks like this system is working and for the industry it's groundbreaking.

[Daniel Konstansky]

I think they were one of the first to think of it in that way.

[Ben Dickstein]

Chris Byrne again to look at what.

[Daniel Konstansky]

Is this nucleus of our product, what is the core of our product. And then we're going to, pun intended, build on that, developing the new products.

[Ben Dickstein]

You don't buy a toy from Lego and then throw it out and buy a new one. You keep adding to your collection, which at first might seem counterintuitive. Wouldn't a company looking to make a profit want you to throw out your old toys so you want to buy their new ones?

[Daniel Konstansky]

It's actually kind of the opposite. Imagine a standard action figure playset, right? I'll use Star Wars, a Millennium Falcon, right? So when you go to manufacture that, every single piece of it has to have its own new mold and you're going to have to assemble it as part of the packaging.

[Ben Dickstein]

It's true. The Millennium Falcon's cockpit, the little gun on top of the Han Solo, they all need separate plastic molds to be manufactured.

[Daniel Konstansky]

So there's all of these steps and processes where a LEGO set. Now there's always new elements, right, to introduce novelty and stuff. But the bulk of it, 60, 70, maybe 80% of it, is elements that they have been making in, you know, by the literal bucket load, you know, for years. In some case, its classic economies of.

[Ben Dickstein]

Scale by Lego making all of its products out of different combinations of the same bricks. They not only have a system that lets each product interact with the other products, but also a system that lets them manufacture much more efficiently than traditional toy companies. But the product still has that major design flaw. The bricks don't stick.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

There is limitation because of the lack of clutch power, as we say.

[Ben Dickstein]

Christian Reimerhaug demonstrates the issue with some bricks from that era.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

So if I let go of this top one, it will just, whoops, fall off, right? So that's the big difference between the.

[Ben Dickstein]

After the Lego System debuts. Gottfrid goes back to the drawing board. Literally at this point, the LEGO bricks have studs on top like they do now, but inside they're hollow. There's nothing to grab onto the studs that are below. Gottfrid and designer Axel Thompson sketch up a number of solutions to address this issue of clutch power. They draw up a few options to add underneath the bricks, X shaped prongs, indented squares.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

But then Godfrey comes up with the solution with the tubes inside the brick tubes.

[Ben Dickstein]

If you look at a LEGO brick now, they're still there. Tubes that allow the brick to grab onto the studs from the brick below, creating that elusive clutch power.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

When we get that, the tubes inside they will stick. That's just a very, very lovely sound that, you know, putting bricks together and taking them apart again.

[Ben Dickstein]

LEGO files the patent for its new and improved toy building brick on January 28, 1958.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

And with that, we get the stability that we need to really bring the LEGO system in Playcom to come to life.

[Ben Dickstein]

Sadly, just two months later, Ole Kirk Kristiansen dies at the age of 66. He never gets to see his company reach its full potential, but he did achieve a lot, guiding his carpentry shop through disaster, depression and war, and turning it into something completely new. Ole's son Godfred takes over LEGO and finally phases wooden toys out of the lineup in 1960. The next year, 1961, we get wheels, right? We get the Lego discovered the wheel.

[Christian Reimer Haug]

Yeah. Well, we won't take credit for inventing the wheel, but we will take credit for the LEGO wheel wheel. Excellent.

[Ben Dickstein]

And what that means after the system debuts, LEGO expands its product line. A motorized train, the first LEGO rocket, bigger LEGO bricks just for preschoolers. And LEGO expands its operations too. By 1966, it's sold in 42 countries. Legoland opens in Billand in 1968. The first minifigure, those little LEGO people, those come out in 1978. And over the following decades, there have been countless new LEGO sets and video games and movies. It's one of the biggest toys in the world. But all of that success, it certainly wouldn't be possible without the LEGO system that came onto the market in 1955. That system is still very much alive, maybe now more than ever.

[Daniel Konstansky]

The LEGO group has a almost relief religious fervor in terms of every part works with every other part. So the, the process that they go through to design new elements is unbelievably rigorous. Right where they are making sure when a new part is developed, they will not only design that part, they'll design every permutation in the family of elements. The roller coasters that they've been releasing over the last 10 years, right at the outset, they designed all of these different things. They came up with the rules, they came up with the proportions, and they basically make these little manuals for these families of elements. So the first year they didn't have loops, but those loops had already been thought of, conceived, and so they worked perfectly with every other piece of track because they had thought through all of that from the get go. So that's one of many ways that they keep the system alive today, where they are very, very careful about what they add and very intentional about what they do with it.

[Ben Dickstein]

The LEGO system is so good, you might not even realize it's there.

[Daniel Konstansky]

That is not an accident, right? They want to make this playground, this walled garden, so perfect that when you grab a piece, it's going to attach. You don't even think about it.

[Ben Dickstein]

And that doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon. Since this episode started started, the factory in Denmark has produced 900,000 Lego pieces. Thanks for listening to History this Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things History this week, sign [e-mail] and if you have any thoughts or questions, please send us an [e-mail] Special thanks to our guests, Christian Reimerhaug, corporate historian at the LEGO Idea House Daniel Konstansky, historian for Blocks Magazine and author of the Secret Life of LEGO Bricks, the story of a design icon and Chris Byrne, researcher, historian and the toy guy. We also want to thank Dana Goldsmith, Andreas Fries and Roberta Cardazo at LEGO for their help with this episode. This episode was produced, hosted and sound designed by me, Ben Dickstein, and story edited by Sally Helm for Backpacket Studios. Our executive producer is me, Ben Dickstein from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow rate and review History this week, wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week.