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It’s been 50 years since the LEGO brick was patented, and since then hundreds of billions of the beloved little pieces have been pumped out of factories for your building enjoyment. What’s even harder to believe is that the LEGO bricks being sold in stores today will still work with the originals dating back 50 years!
This is such a big deal that even Google whipped up a customized version of their logo to celebrate the anniversary. Gizmodo also wanted to commemorate the event so they put together the timeline pictured above. Here are some of my favorite stats that they scrounged up:
- There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants.
- Children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.
- 2.16 million LEGO elements are molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute.
- More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949.
- 7 LEGO sets are sold by retailers every second around the world.
- 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the earth with the moon.
The LEGO brick could be the only thing that we can count on staying the same over the next 50 years. I would be curious to know whether any of our readers have never played with LEGO’s before.
What’s this? No comments? Am I the only one who still enjoys messing around with LEGOs? Come on now…don’t be shy. There is nothing too geeky about loving LEGO’s.
A big Congratulations to the LEGO company for making it through 50 years of complaints about how so-and-so swallowed a LEGO as well as entertaining me when I had nothing else to do. Let’s see if they can survive another 50 years. Perhaps LEGO’s that are comprised of LEDs that display images? That would be quite nice.
LEGO tried doing things like that for a while, going away from it’s core piece. Sales went down until they moved focus back to the simple LEGO piece that it’s all about. Not saying other products don’t work (I love the Mindstorms, and your idea seems interesting), but they still need to keep focus to survive..
No frickin’ way are you the only one who loves messing around with LEGOs!
I was just going through my whole collection this weekend, which includes the three collector plane sets they issued as limited editions, trains and gobs of track, and lots of miscellaneous pieces dating back 20+ years. I’m afraid to think how much my “investment” is worth.
Maybe you could build an Optimus LEGO-mus keyboard if they made LEGO bricks embedded with OLEDs!
Congratulations LEGO! Here’s to another 50 years of keeping adult children amused!
I actually haven’t played with LEGO’s in a few years, but writing this article has brought back some great memories. I almost want to go dig them out again.
Okay, now that would be uber sweet! The possibilities with an OLED LEGO set would be endless. We could make our own LEGO TV’s.