Toymaker Lego turns sixty

The name Lego was invented by combining the first two letters of the Danish words “Leg godt” (play well) without knowing that the word in Latin means “I assemble.” Now sixty years old, the Lego brick had various iterations since it first started making them in 1949. The earliest version of the brick, called the Automated Binding Brick, had the distinctive studs on top, but was hollow underneath - and a flop in toy stores. By 1958 Lego bricks were refined into the shiny plastic bricks of today, with tubes inside the hollows to allow pieces to grip together more firmly. Today thousands of tiny Lego pieces are continually flowing off the production line, satisfying a global demand.