Qualla: The Lego Group

The Lego Group: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrzej Otrębski, CC BY-SA 4.0. The invention is the tubes. Pull two Lego bricks apart and look up inside the top one: three little hollow cylinders in a row, set so that the studs of the brick below grip them from three sides at once. That is the whole trick. It is why a brick moulded in Billund in 1958 still snaps onto one moulded this morning, and why a Danish carpentry shop that went into toys because nobody was buying furniture ended up the largest toy company on earth.

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Image: Andrzej Otrębski | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Lego Group: The Carpenter Who Ran Out of Furniture

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit de:Benutzer:Kobel, Public domain. Ole Kirk Christiansen founded the business on 10 August 1932. He was a carpenter in Billund, a village on the flat sandy plain of central Jutland, and the Great Depression had gutted demand for the household goods that had been his living. Toys were what a man with a workshop and...

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Image: de:Benutzer:Kobel | Public domain

The Lego Group: A Machine, a Sample, and a Fire

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Miaow Miaow, Public domain. In 1947 the company bought a plastic injection-moulding machine. Along with it came sample bricks - Self-Locking Building Bricks, invented in 1939 by the English designer Hilary Fisher Page and patented in Britain the following year. Lego's own version, the Automatic Binding Bric...

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Image: User:Miaow Miaow | Public domain

The Lego Group: Ten Micrometres

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Miaow Miaow, Public domain. What protects the system now is precision. Finished bricks are held to a tolerance of ten micrometres, roughly a tenth the width of a human hair, because a brick slightly too loose falls off and a brick slightly too tight will not come apart. Somewhere near 36 billion elements le...

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Image: User:Miaow Miaow | Public domain

The Lego Group: The Year the Bricks Nearly Stopped

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kaʁstn Disk/Cat, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. By 2003 the company was in genuine danger. It closed the year with a deficit of 1.4 billion kroner, about 220 million US dollars, and Poul Plougmann was replaced as president by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the founder's grandson. Nearly a thousand people lost their jobs in the round ...

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Image: kaʁstn Disk/Cat | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The Lego Group: Billund

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Miaow Miaow, Public domain. The village has an international airport because a toy company needed one - the Christiansens began building it in 1961 to move product to the world. By the first half of 2015 Lego had passed Mattel to become the largest toy company on earth by revenue, on sales of 2.1 billion do...

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Image: User:Miaow Miaow | Public domain