Bricksmith bionicle5/24/2023 ![]() The Lego wheel earned its own patent application. ![]() Lego began inventing items that, in hindsight, are incredible to think of as innovations: In the 1960s, the company's bricksmiths invented the wheel, a round brick with a rubber tyre. ![]() "Decades before the rise of 'value webs' and Apple's 'brand ecosystem' of i-centred offerings, Lego took a holistic view of its product family, with the ubiquitous brick as the touchstone," wrote Robertson, a senior lecturer at MIT's business school. You never get tired of Lego," one of its publicity campaigns said. "You can go on and on, building and building. Lego executives, observing how children played with their products, realised the firm's future success was not about the brick, but what the brick could create: buildings, streets, cities, all filled with people, vehicles, street signs, and bushes. But it was the bricks that really built the company. That same year, the company's founder died. Lego also made sure that new bricks were always compatible with old ones. The new system gave children the chance to build something sturdy, without it wobbling, or coming undone. Then, in January 1958, Lego obtained a patent for an idea it had been working on for years: a stud-and-tube design that allows children to snap the bricks together without them coming apart. They didn't snap to each other very well. But the bricks were selling poorly, Robertson wrote. By 1953, the "automatic" pieces got a formal, new name: "Lego Bricks". The only problem was that they weren't all that sturdy and children hadn't yet embraced plastic toys. But the Christiansens modified the size of the bricks, sharpening the edges. Ole and Godtfred grew interested in them from British inventor Hilary Fisher Page's plastic, stackable cubes with two rows of four studs. Christiansen nearly ended his gambit, according to Robertson, but soldiered on.īy the late 1940s, Lego finally produced what it called "automated binding bricks", a precursor to the bricks of today. But two years later, the factory suffered a fire, which destroyed Lego's entire inventory and its blueprints for new toys. He got some help from one of his sons, though: Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, who had been building toy models for the company as a teenager, became a Lego manager in 1940. Ole Kirk Christiansen, a widower, was running the business on his own, all while raising four sons, in the backdrop of the Great Depression and later, the German invasion of Denmark. With it's connectable plastic bricks, Lego came to reflect the evolution of childhood imagination around the world, a remarkable feat given that its founder didn't have much schooling.īut now that childhood playtime is rapidly shifting to screens, Lego is trying to hold on to Christiansen's legacy. Lego faces a fresh challenge to reconnect with its young fans. Though Lego's first toys were simple yo-yos, trucks and ducks on wheels, the company would eventually become one of the most respected brands in the world, alongside Apple and Nike, never mind Mattel or Hasbro. The name derived from the Danish words "leg" and "godt," meaning play and well. As other businesses closed, Christiansen doubled down on wood, starting a company that manufactured stepladders, ironing boards along with an entirely new product line: wooden toys. In 1932, with the Great Depression rocking the industrialised world, a master carpenter in Denmark named Ole Kirk Christiansen desperately needed a way to earn a living.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |