Long before colour-sorted parts drawers and minifigure armies, LEGO® was a one-man carpentry shop making ladders, stools and wooden toys in rural Billund. Few could have imagined that small workshop would grow into a global building language with billions of bricks.
A carpenter in Billund
The story starts with Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, born in 1891, who bought a small woodworking shop in Billund in the 1910s and initially produced household items like ladders and ironing boards. During the Great Depression of the early 1930s, demand for that furniture collapsed, so he pivoted to wooden toys – pull-along animals, trucks and building blocks made from carefully dried birch.
In 1934 he adopted the brand name "LEGO", derived from the Danish phrase leg godt – "play well", a motto that summarised his view of good toys as tools for creative play. That name would later become synonymous with interlocking plastic bricks, but at the time it labelled finely varnished wooden ducks on wheels.
Fire, rebuilding, and a shift towards toys
The 1930s and early 1940s were anything but easy. Christiansen's workshop burned down in 1924 and again in 1942, forcing him to rebuild and modernise his facilities. Each time he doubled down on toys rather than returning to pure carpentry, expanding from simple pull-along animals to more sophisticated construction sets.
By the mid-1940s LEGO employed dozens of people and was essentially a full-time toy manufacturer, but still mostly in wood. Wooden yoyos and the famous wooden duck were bestsellers in Scandinavia, setting up the brand as a maker of durable, well-finished toys even before plastic came into the picture.
Discovering plastic and the idea of the brick
Everything changed when Christiansen encountered injection-moulded plastic toys shortly after World War II. In 1947 LEGO became the first toymaker in Denmark to purchase a plastic moulding machine, initially using it for simple plastic toys while still producing wooden lines in parallel.
Around this time, British company Kiddicraft had patented "Self-Locking Building Bricks" – hollow plastic cubes with studs that allowed interlocking construction. LEGO received sample Kiddicraft bricks via the machinery supplier and began experimenting with similar elements, releasing its own "Automatic Binding Bricks" in 1949. Early versions lacked the inner tube system we know today and had limited clutch power, but the core idea of a reusable, interlocking building system was in place.
Perfecting the stud-and-tube LEGO brick
Over the next decade, Ole's son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen refined both the brick and the overall construction system. He introduced the now-famous stud-and-tube coupling on the underside of the brick, vastly improving stability and allowing strong vertical and sideways connections. This innovation turned the brick from a simple stackable toy into a coherent "System in Play" where all elements worked together.
The modern LEGO brick design was patented on 28 January 1958, using durable ABS plastic and a bright colour palette inspired in part by modernist design. Remarkably, this basic geometry still underpins the parts catalogues that AFOLs and MOC builders use today – the bricks in your CrocoBricks order still click onto that same 1958 standard.
From bricks in boxes to "System i Leg"
In the 1950s LEGO gradually phased out most wooden toys and focused more and more on plastic building sets. Instead of selling random assortments of bricks, the company began organising elements into themed sets with instructions for houses, vehicles and towns, while stressing that all pieces could be recombined freely.
This philosophy was marketed as "LEGO System i Leg" ("System in Play") – a modular approach where every new set expanded the possibilities of your existing collection rather than standing alone. Many AFOLs today still feel that same logic: you buy a new Icons set, break it apart and immediately spot which pieces work perfectly for your next MOC.
Bringing life to the brick: the minifigure arrives
For decades LEGO sets featured houses, cars and trains but no real inhabitants. In the 1970s, management deliberately pursued figures to add role-play to the system. After experiments with larger brick-built "Maxifigures" in 1974 and small faceless figures in 1975, designer Jens Nygaard Knudsen developed a compact character with movable arms and legs, four bricks tall.
The LEGO minifigure launched in 1978 alongside the first Town, Castle and Space themes, featuring the iconic classic smiley face. From that moment, the system had not only architecture but also characters – a change that still drives today's minifigure and parts markets, from Classic Town figs to highly detailed licensed characters.
Why LEGO history matters to parts hunters
For CrocoBricks customers, this history isn't trivia – it's context for what you're working with today:
- That 1958 stud-and-tube design explains why new parts still combine with vintage bricks from the 1960s – useful when building MOCs that mix old and new pieces.
- The shift from wooden toys to System in Play explains why thousands of different parts and colours exist: each decade LEGO added new elements to make more types of builds possible.
- The arrival of the minifigure in 1978 marks the start of a separate collector world for figure parts – exactly the world CrocoBricks now supplies with loose minifigs and parts.
CrocoBricks fits into that long line as a modern independent parts hub: where the factory once invented the basic brick, you can now source 200,000+ variants of that idea for your own projects.
FAQ
When did LEGO switch from wooden toys to plastic bricks?
LEGO started as a wooden-toy maker in the 1930s and introduced plastic toys after buying an injection-moulding machine in 1947; the first plastic "Automatic Binding Bricks" appeared in 1949, and the modern ABS brick design was patented in 1958.
Did LEGO invent the interlocking brick from scratch?
No. The design was influenced by Hilary Fisher Page's Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks from the 1940s, but LEGO significantly refined the concept with the stud-and-tube system and globalised it as an open "System in Play".
What does the name "LEGO" actually mean?
"LEGO" comes from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well", adopted by Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1934; later fans noticed the Latin coincidence "lego" = "I put together".
When were LEGO minifigures introduced?
The modern minifigure with moving arms and legs debuted in 1978 in Town, Castle and Space sets after several earlier figure experiments in the 1970s.
Why do old and new LEGO bricks still fit together?
Because the basic measurements and stud-and-tube geometry from the 1958 patent have stayed consistent; LEGO designs new parts around that standard, so your latest CrocoBricks order still connects with bricks from your childhood.
