Making LEGO Bricks Stick Redefined a Toy Company
June 22, 2023The LEGO brick didn’t always stick.
That ability for the plastic bricks to grab onto and clutch one another came about 11 years after the company started selling the plastic toys. But once bricks did stick, the company took a massive leap of faith, mothballing more than 200 different toys to focus solely on the studded plastic.
The story of how and why the toy went from stackable to stickable touches on the history of the LEGO Group, the brick’s empowerment of creativity – the very core of the now 90-year-old toy maker – and how the ability for bricks to clutch one another prevented a once fragile company from falling apart.
The inception of the modern LEGO brick can be traced back to 1949 when the company, just beginning to expand from wooden toys to plastic, released the Automatic Binding Brick.
The original brick was hollow underneath, and instead of snapping together, they just stacked on one another. It wasn’t until 1958 that the company redesigned the brick to implement its defining feature: clutch power.
Back in 1954, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, the son of the company’s founder, began researching the LEGO Group’s surprisingly diverse catalog of toys to see if he could develop a system that allowed all of the toys to work with one another. At the time, the company had more than 200 different products, but he noticed that Automatic Binding Bricks were becoming very popular.
“The one product he feels has the best potential is the hollow, stackable plastic brick,” said Kristian Reimer Hauge, a corporate historian with the LEGO Group. “So he tries to see if we can make some kind of ecosystem out of these bricks to make sure that all bricks we do in the future fit with the ones we have today, no matter when they are produced or where they are produced.
“But after introducing this new idea, it gets more and more apparent that we need stability. We can’t make this system that we want to make happen. We can’t do it without getting more stability.”
Christiansen ends up designing a solution that uses knobs on the top of the brick and tubes underneath them. The new design allows the bricks to click together and clutch one another until pulled apart.
“After coming up with this solution, it all goes very, very quickly,” Hauge said. “Five days after that meeting, we take out the patent for the LEGO brick we know today.”
That patent shows that LEGO bricks make use of something called interference fit to stick together, said Becky Simmons, an associate professor of practice in mechanical engineering and material science at Duke University.
“LEGO bricks stick together because the pegs that are on the top of the brick are a little bit bigger than the area they fit into on their joining brick,” she said. “This causes the pegs on the top to be squeezed a little, and that area that they fit into to stretch a little bit, and it’s really this squeeze and stretch, plus friction, that holds the bricks together.
“The really amazing thing about LEGO bricks is that interference fits are complicated. They require great precision in measurements in manufacturing. And the unique thing is that the LEGO Group has found this perfect fit. I think it’s a super clever design.”
And it’s the LEGO System in Play, augmented by that design, that not only redefined the company but helped turn it into a powerhouse of play that continues to thrive.
“The fact that it only takes us five days from idea to patent is the best way to illustrate that we knew this was a big deal,” Hauge said. “This is important. This is our future. And because of this, two years later, in 1960, the company and Godtfred Kirk Christiansen – the second-generation owner – made a very big decision to stop all of the other toys we were making.
“That’s when we say goodbye to how the company started in wooden toys, but we also stopped the production of all of the other plastic toys that we had been making. So from ‘60 onwards, we as a company, say we are now only focusing on the LEGO brick and the LEGO System in Play. We know, after coming up with this new clutch power, this is the future for us.”
