Bytes: LEGO PIECES

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Whilst driving to work last week I heard an ad on the radio for a LEGO exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney. It had me thinking about LEGO, here are some pieces about it . . .

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Lego Exhibition:

The Australian Museum exhibition started on March 5 and continues to 29 May 2022. Tickets and bookings are required.

The exhibition is called Jurassic World by Brickman, ties in with the Jurassic Park films and is the largest LEGO exhibition in Australian history.

The latest Jurassic film, Jurassic World Dominion, debuts in cinemas June 2022.

The exhibition has over 50 large-scale dinosaurs, props, scenes and activities made from over 6 million LEGO bricks and is interactive.

Some pics:

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As of 2021, Lego was the largest toy company in the world.

The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously coloured interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Anything constructed can be taken apart again, and the pieces reused to make new things.

The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949.

Movies, games, competitions and eight Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand.

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The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932.

Lego founder Ole Kirk Christiansen

In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well".

In 1947, Lego expanded to begin producing plastic toys. In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". These bricks were based on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which had been patented in the United Kingdom in 1939 and released in 1947.

Lego had received a sample of the Kiddicraft bricks from the supplier of an injection-moulding machine that it purchased.[The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate, were a development of the traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time.

The Lego Group's motto, "only the best is good enough" was created in 1936. This motto, which is still used today, was created by Christiansen to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly.

By 1951 plastic toys accounted for half of the Lego company's output.

By 1954, Christiansen's son, Godtfred, had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group. It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that led to the idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the immense potential in Lego bricks to become a system for creative play, but the bricks still had some problems from a technical standpoint: their locking ability was limited and they were not versatile. In 1958, the modern brick design was developed; it took five years to find the right material for it, ABS polymer.

In 1978, Lego produced the first minifigures, which have since become a staple in most sets.

In May 2011, Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134 brought 13 Lego kits to the International Space Station, where astronauts built models to see how they would react in microgravity, as a part of the Lego Bricks in Space program.

In May 2013, the largest model ever created was displayed in New York City and was made of over 5 million bricks; a 1:1 scale model of an X-wing fighter:

Other records include a 34-metre tower:

and a 4 km railway:

In February 2015, marketing consulting company Brand Finance ranked Lego as the "world's most powerful brand", overtaking Ferrari.

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Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at several locations around the world. Moulding is done in Billund, Denmark; Nyíregyháza, Hungary; Monterrey, Mexico and most recently in Jiaxing, China. Brick decorations and packaging are done at plants in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico and Kladno in the Czech Republic.

The Lego Group estimates that in five decades it has produced 400 billion Lego blocks. Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 36 billion, or about 1140 elements per second.

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The last significant patent for Lego bricks expired in 1978.

Since then, competitors have produced blocks of similar dimensions and design that can be connected with Lego bricks.

In 2002, Lego sued the CoCo Toy Company in Beijing for copyright infringement over its "Coko bricks" product. CoCo was ordered to cease manufacture of the products, publish a formal apology and pay damages.

Lego sued the English company Best-Lock Construction Toys in German courts in 2004 and 2009; the Federal Patent Court of Germany denied Lego trademark protection for the shape of its bricks for the latter case.

In 2005, the Lego Company sued Canadian company Mega Bloks for trademark violation, but the Supreme Court of Canada upheld Mega Bloks' rights to sell their product.

In 2010, the European Court of Justice ruled that the eight-peg design of the original Lego brick "merely performs a technical function [and] cannot be registered as a trademark."

In 2020 and 2021 Lego sent cease and desist letters to small toy retailers and popular YouTubers in Germany. In 2021 the situation escalated when Lego let a container delivered by clone producer Qman block in the harbor of Bremen for trademark infringement, and to test for contamination with dangerous materials. The recipient toy retailer initiated an appeal for donations to import containers of Lego clones from China to Germany and donate them to children's homes, which received more than €350,000 within a couple of weeks.

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Some visuals funnies . . .