Hi Everyone!

Wednesday, Mama went to town to do some shopping and she brought back a surprise for me…a LEGO building block set.

Now, I think most people know what LEGOs are but for those few persons that don’t, it is a special engineered plastic block that connects with other blocks.

I ask Dada if he could look on the Internet and find out information on LEGOs and how they were invented. I, also, wanted to find some ideas for building different things with my new LEGOs. Dada said that this year is the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Lego building block.

It was at 1:58 p.m. on January 28, 1958, that LEGO president Godtfred Kirk Christiansen filed a patent for the plastic brick with its stud-and-hole design. Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion LEGO elements, or about 62 bricks for every person on the planet.

The LEGO’s legacy lies less in numbers than in its creative influence. These colorful bricks have littered playroom floors for generations of families. But they have also spurred ingenuity among children that few toys can claim before and since. The company has always emphasized the importance of free-form play, and LEGO’s popularity can be attributed to the amount of imagination children use to build with the bricks.

The LEGO company was founded in 1932 by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund who had a sideline in wooden toys. He named the company after an amalgamation of the Danish phrase “leg godt,” which means “play well.”

The basic eight-stud red LEGO brick was first sold in Denmark in 1949. But it took a further nine years for Ole Kirk’s son, Godtfred Kirk, to file the patent for the versatile “Automatic Binding Brick” with its interlocking 2×4 studs. The plastic bricks are part of a unique system: tiny tubes inside give the knobs on top of other blocks more places to grip. They hold together well but can be taken apart easily by a child. And consistency has been key: the bricks produced today have the same bumps and holes, and can still interlock withthose produced back in 1958. Fifty years on and the LEGO Group is the world’s fifth largest toymaker in terms of sales, after Mattel, Hasbro, Bandai and MGA Entertainment.

Since it began producing plastic bricks, the LEGO Group has released thousands of play sets themed around a variety of topics. Examples include, but are not limited to, space, robots, pirates, vikings, medieval castles, dinosaurs, holiday locations, scuba diving, the wild west, the Arctic, airports, miners, Star Wars, Batman, SpongeBob SquarePants, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones and LEGO Speed Racer. New elements are often released along with new sets. There are also LEGO sets designed to appeal to young girls such as the Clikits line which consists of small interlocking parts that are meant to encourage creativity and arts and crafts, much like regular LEGO bricks. Clikit pieces can interlock with regular LEGO bricks as decorative elements.

The LEGO range has expanded to encompass accessory motors, gears, lights, sensors, and cameras designed to be used with LEGO components. There are even special bricks, like the LEGO NXT that can be programmed with a PC or a Mac to perform very complicated and useful tasks. These programmable bricks are sold under the name Lego Mindstorms.

Bionicle is a line of toys by the LEGO Group that is marketed towards those in the 7-16-year-old age range. The line was launched in January 2001 in Europe and June/July 2001 in the United States. The Bionicle idea originated from the earlier toy lines Slizers (also known as Throwbots) and Roboriders. Both of these lines had similar throwing disks and characters based on classical elements. The sets in the Bionicle line have increased in size and flexibility through the years.

 Dada found out some fun facts about Lego blocks on the LEGO company website. Here are some of the facts:

• More than 400 million children and adults will play with LEGO bricks this year.
• LEGO products are on sale in more than 130 countries.
• If you built a column of about 40,000,000,000 LEGO bricks, it would reach the moon.
• Approx. seven LEGO sets are sold each second.
• Approx. 19 billion LEGO elements are made every year in Billund - equivalent to approx. 2m elements an hour or 36,000 a minute.
• If all LEGO sets sold in a year were stacked on top of each other, they would fill a football field to a height of 77.8 m.
• Laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in a year would reach more than five times round the world.
• Since BIONICLE figures first appeared in 2001, more than 150 million BIONICLE “beings” have been born. That’s more than the population of France and Britain put together.
• The eight robots and 15 automatic cranes that work in the LEGO warehouse in Billund, Denmark can shift 660 crates of bricks in and out every hour.
• The world’s children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.
• In the manufacture of LEGO bricks the machine tolerance is as small as 0.002 mm.
• The LEGO Club has 2.4m members worldwide.
• Approx. 400 billion LEGO elements have been manufactured since 1949.

I really enjoyed searching on the Internet, with Dada, for all the interesting information about LEGO blocks. There are a lot of good pictures on the Internet of different things that have been built with LEGO blocks. I am going to have a lot of fun building differnt types of buildings. Mama said that it is great toy to play with on rainy days. Dada said it is a great toy to help children build their motor skills. Later, I ‘ll have to ask him what that means?

I hope that you will have a great weekend. Thanks for your visit!

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