📢 SERIES: Iconic patented toys and games of our time!
🧱 LEGO owned by the LEGO Group

📰 When Ole Kirk Kristiansen imported a new-fangled contraption called a plastic injection­moulding machine to Denmark in 1946, people thought he had lost his mind. Kirk Kristiansen was a master carpenter who made wooden toys sold under the brand name LEGO (abbreviated from leg godt, Danish for “play well”). The machine cost nearly 7% of the company’s annual revenue, but Kirk Kristiansen reckoned there was no limit to what he could manufacture with the new technology. After making modest progress with interlocking indentations a concept borrowed from his own son, Godtfred, he set to work on a mechanism for binding blocks together. After years of trial and error, he perfected the stud-and-tube coupling system that defines LEGO to this day.

📰 Godtfred filed for a patent the year Ole died. Countless variations on the form followed over the decades – from roof tiles to Jedi weaponry – all of which can click with bricks from the Eisenhower era.

ℹ️ Sources:
https://www.wired.com/
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3005282.pdf
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/