LEGO
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| The LEGO Group | |
|---|---|
| Industry: |
Toys and entertainment |
| Owner: |
Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen |
| Website: | |
LEGO is a line of toys featuring colourful plastic bricks, gears, minifigures (also called minifigs and figs), and other pieces which can be assembled to create models of almost anything imaginable. Cars, planes, trains, buildings, castles, sculptures, ships, spaceships, and even working robots are just part of a short list of the many things that can be built with LEGO bricks. High production quality and careful attention to detail ensures that LEGO pieces can fit together in myriad ways, which is one of the main reasons for the toy's success. Coincidentally, "LEGO" translates into various Latin meanings such as "Assemble" and "Connect".
The sets are produced by the LEGO Group, a privately-held company based in Denmark.
Contents
History
The LEGO Group The KKK is ok your just wrong... Karen
The LEGO trademark
The LEGO Group's name has become so synonymous with its flagship toy that many use the words "LEGO" (collectively) or "LEGOs" to refer to the bricks themselves, and even to any plastic bricks resembling LEGO bricks, although the LEGO Group discourages this as dilution of their trademark. LEGO catalogs in the 1970s and 1980s contained a note that read:
The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'legos.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you! Susan Williams, Consumer Services.
"LEGO" is officially written in all uppercase letters. The company asserts that to protect its brand name, the word LEGO must always be used as an adjective, as in "LEGO set," "LEGO products," "LEGO universe," and so forth. Nevertheless, such corporate admonitions are frequently ignored as corporate intervention in the use of language, and the word lego is commonly used not only as a noun to refer to LEGO bricks but also as a generic term referring to any kind of interlocking toy brick.
Design and manufacture
History
The first official LEGO pieces were made in 1949 with a plastic called cellulose acetate. These bricks had a slot at one end which allowed windows and doors to be fitted. The first pieces had flat undersides, which led to them falling apart easily.
In 1958, LEGO introduced and patented the stud and tube locking system, which is still used today. The new system created many new ways to connect the bricks and also made possible the sloping roof system which was introduced the same year.[1]
In 1963, LEGO began using a plastic called ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) to manufacture their bricks. It is stronger and far less prone to warping than cellulose acetate.[2] While colours have changed over time and moulds have been optimised, ABS remains the primary component of opaque LEGO bricks.
Present day
Since their introduction in 1949, LEGO pieces of all varieties have been, first and foremost, part of a system. LEGO pieces from 1963 still interlock with pieces made today, despite radical changes in shape and design over the years. Retail LEGO sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers.
Bricks, beams, axles, minifigures, and all other elements in the LEGO system are manufactured to an exacting degree of tolerance. When snapped together, pieces must have just the right amount of "clutch power"; they must stay together until pulled apart. They cannot be too easy to pull apart, or the result will be LEGO creations that are unstable; they cannot be too difficult to pull apart, since the disassembly of one creation in order to build another is part of the LEGO appeal. In order for pieces to have just the right "clutch power", LEGO elements are manufactured within a tolerance of 2 micrometers (0.00008 in).
Precision-machined, small-capacity molds are used, and human inspectors meticulously check the output of the molds, to eliminate significant variations in color or thickness. Worn-out molds are encased in the foundations of buildings to prevent their falling into competitors' hands. According to the LEGO Group, its molding processes are so accurate that only 18 bricks out of every million fail to meet its stringent standards. It is thanks to this care in manufacturing that the LEGO Group has maintained such a high degree of quality over the decades; this is one of the main reasons that pieces manufactured over 40 years ago still interlock neatly with pieces manufactured today.
Manufacturing of LEGO bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. Molding is done at one of two plants in Denmark and Switzerland. Brick decorations and packaging is done at plants in Denmark, Switzerland, United States, South Korea, the Czech Republic and more recently, China. Annual production of LEGO bricks averages approximately 20 billion (2 × 1010) per year, or about 600 pieces per second.
LEGO today
Since it began producing plastic bricks, the LEGO Group has released thousands of play sets themed around Space, robots, Pirate, Vikings, Knight's Kingdom, Dinosaurs, cities, suburbia, holiday locations, Wild West, the Arctic, Ferrari, Trains, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Harry Potter, BIONICLE, and more. Sets containing new pieces are released frequently. In 2006 LEGO announced the procurement of worldwide toy rights with the cable TV channel Nickelodeon for building sets with themes from two hit TV shows, SpongeBob SquarePants and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
There are also motors, gears, lights, sensors, and cameras available to be used with LEGO components. There are even special bricks, like the LEGO RCX that can be programmed with a PC to perform very complicated and useful tasks. These programmable bricks are sold under the name LEGO Mindstorms.
There are several competitions which use LEGO bricks and the RCX, among other microcontrollers, for robotics. The earliest, and likely the largest, is Botball, a national US middle- and high-school competition stemming from the MIT 6270 LEGO robotics tournament. A related competition is First LEGO League for elementary and middle schools. The international RoboCup Junior autonomous Soccer competition involves extensive use of LEGO Mindstorms equipment which is often pushed to its limits. LEGO Mindstorms provides primary and secondary school aged participants of RoboCup Junior an easy and intuitive introduction to robotics. It also allows advanced participants an opportunity to modify the LEGO Mindstorms platform, adding their own sensors and actuators, as well as other mechanical, electrical, electronic and software related systems.
LEGO Group operates several LEGOland amusement parks in Europe and California. There are also several LEGO retail stores, including one in Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney area near Orlando, Florida and in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. As of year end 2005, there are 25 LEGO Brand Retail stores in the USA, a number of stores in Europe, and a franchised LEGO store in Abu Dhabi.
Novel applications of LEGO
LEGO bricks today are used for purposes beyond children's play. The LEGO Group itself has developed a form of business consultancy fostering creative thinking, called Serious Play, in which team members build metaphors of their organisational experiences using LEGO bricks, and work through imaginary scenarios using the visual device of the LEGO constructions and by exploring possibilities in a 'serious' form of 'play'.
A large following of people who have used LEGO pieces to make sculptures, very large mosaics and complex machines has developed. Some sculptures use hundreds of thousands of pieces and weigh tens of kilograms. Large mosaics, fully functional padlocks and pendulum clocks, a harpsichord and an inkjet printer (built by Google co-founder Larry Page while at the University of Michigan) have been constructed from LEGO pieces. One such masterpiece solves a Rubik's Cube through the use of LEGO motors and cameras, a task that many humans cannot accomplish. Even an eclipse-predicting computer was once built! Photos of many fan creations like these can be seen at Brickshelf and at MOCpages. A group which calls itself "AFOLs" (for "Adult Fans of LEGO") is an important demographic for The LEGO Group, which has recently begun reintroducing popular sets from previous years to appeal to this group.
The LEGO system in art
One hobby among enthusiasts is to re-create popular scenes from famous movies, using LEGO bricks for the scenery and LEGO play sets as characters. Such movies are called "LEGO movies", "Brickfilms", or "cinema LEGO". They usually use stop-motion animation. For example, the Monty Python and the Holy Grail Special Edition DVD contained a version of the "Camelot" musical sequence redone with LEGO minifigures and accessories.
Artists have also used LEGO sets with one of the more notorious examples being Polish artist Zbigniew Libera's "LEGO Concentration Camp," a collection of mocked-up concentration camp-themed LEGO sets.[1]
The Little Artists have created an entire Modern Art collection in a LEGO Gallery. 'Art Craziest Nation' was shown at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, UK. [2]
Another notable example is the award-winning music video for the song "Fell in Love with a Girl" by the White Stripes. Director Michel Gondry filmed a live version of the video, digitized the result, and then recreated it entirely with LEGO bricks.
In 2009, TV Presenter and Broadcaster James May and 1000 other volunteers built a full-size house in a vineyard in Surrey, England, complete with functioning toilet and hot shower, using 3.3 million LEGO bricks for his television show "James May's Toy Stories". [3]. It was valued as a property at between £5000 and £20,000, and as a piece of art Paul Nelson of the University for the Creative Arts valued it at £500,000. [4] Due to issues over the license for the LEGO bricks and nobody purchasing the house after LEGOLAND Windsor rejected it over the cost and implications of moving the structure, it was demolished later that year. [5]
Several webcomics are illustrated with LEGO, notably Irregular Webcomic!.
LEGO itself sells a line of sets named "LEGO Studios," which contains a LEGO webcam (repackaged Logitech USB Quickcam), software to record video on a computer, clear plastic rods which can be used to manipulate minifigures from off-camera, and a Director minifigure.
Notes
| Bricks | Configurations |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 24 |
| 3 | 1,560 |
| 4 | 119,580 |
| 5 | 10,116,403 |
| 6 | 915,103,765 |
| 7 | 85,747,377,755 |
- Six eight-stud LEGO bricks of the same colour can be put together in 915,103,765 ways, and just three bricks of the same colour offer 1,560 combinations. The figure of 102,981,500 is often given for six pieces, but it is incorrect. The number 102,981,504 (four more than that figure) is the number of six-piece towers (of a height of six). The number of contiguous configurations for one through seven bricks, counting reflections but not counting rotations are shown in the table on the right.
- LEGO is the world's largest tire manufacturer in terms of units, producing over 300,000,000 per year.[3]
- References: The Entropy of LEGO, A LEGO Counting Problem, and OEIS Sequence A112389 in external links.
References, and further reading
2005:
- Bedford, Allan. The Unofficial LEGO® Builder's Guide. 2005. ISBN 1-59327-054-2.
2003:
- Clague, Kevin, Miguel Agullo, and Lars C. Hassing. LEGO® Software Power Tools, With LDraw, MLCad, and LPub. 2003. ISBN 1-931836-76-0
- Courtney, Tim. Virtual LEGO®: The Official LDraw.org Guide to LDraw Tools for Windows. 2003. ISBN 1-886411-94-8.
- McKee, Jacob H. Getting Started with LEGO® Trains. No Starch Press, 2003. ISBN 1-59327-006-2.
2001:
- Ferrari, Mario, Giulio Ferrari, and Ralph Hempel. Building Robots With LEGO® Mindstorms: The Ultimate Tool for Mindstorms Maniacs. 2001. ISBN 1-928994-67-9.
1999:
- Kristiansen, Kjeld Kirk, foreword. The Ultimate LEGO® Book. New York: DK Publishing Book, 1999. ISBN 0-7894-4691-X.
1987:
- Wiencek, Henry. The World of LEGO® Toys. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1987. ISBN 0-8109-2362-9.
See also
External links
- Official
- LEGO official website
- LEGO Shop At Home The world's largest LEGO shop
- FIRST LEGO League LEGO robotics competition
- News and community
- LEGOFan A LEGO Portal Web site run by fans, for fans
- Eurobricks Forums a large forum for LEGO fans
- Brick-Builder.com A LEGO Fan Forum
- Lugnet LEGO Users Group Network
- Bricks in my Pocket (BimP) PodCast devoted to the LEGO community
- The Brickish Association British LEGO Fan Association
- ILTCO: International LEGO Train Club Organization
- Bricksinmotion A 'Brick' filming enthusiast site
- LOWLUG LEGO User Group of the Lowlands (Dutch LUG site)
- Database, reference and stores
- Brickset Guide to LEGO sets past and present
- Peeron LEGO Set and Part Inventory Database
- Bricklink Buying and selling sets and parts
- The Brictionary, a LEGO Wiki
- BrickWiki Open Content LEGO Encyclopedia; the guide and gateway to the LEGO collective
- Wiki-Brick-Links Open directory of links to LEGO sites
- LEGO Building Instructions Official building instructions website
- Minitalia Reference A guide to LEGO Minitalia sets with a brief history
- Creations
- Brickshelf website to post pictures of LEGO creations
- MOC Pages
- Classic-Castle.com Castle-themed LEGO creations
- Classic-Space.com Space-themed LEGO creations
- From Bricks to Bothans Star Wars-themed LEGO creations
- Town and train creations
- The Brick Apple New York inspired creations
- LEGO mosaics & sculptures
- LEGO sculptures
- Serious LEGO Various machines, including a Rubik's Cube solver
- LEGO Castle Project
- The Brick Testament - The bible illustrated with LEGO creations
- ME Models - Add a Little Realism to your Hobby - Custom Sets
- acarol.woz.org A fully functional 3 Digit Babbage Difference Engine made from LEGO TECHNIC
- Games
- LEGO Star Wars - The video game
- Online games
- Brikwars Wargames using LEGO elements
- Educational
- LEGO on PC
- Informational
- Making of a Brick An interactive flash video showing the making of a LEGO brick
- Mathematics
- A LEGO Counting problem – In just how many ways can six LEGO bricks be combined?
- The Entropy of LEGO
- OEIS Sequence A007575 A007576 A082679 A112389 A112390
