The Carpenter's Bricks

A boy came home with a sack of wooden ducks. They were pull-along toys, painted and varnished, made in his father's workshop and delivered that day to the railway station to be sent to a shop.

He was pleased with himself. He had saved the company some money, he explained: instead of three coats of varnish, he had given the ducks only two.

His father listened. Then he told the boy to go back to the station, collect the ducks, bring them home and finish the job properly that night. The boy was Godtfred Kirk Christiansen. His father was Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter, and the little company in their village would one day be known everywhere as LEGO.

The carpenter of Billund

Ole Kirk Christiansen was born in 1891 into a poor farming family in western Denmark, one of many children. As a young man he trained as a carpenter and worked for some years abroad.

In 1916 he bought a small joinery workshop in Billund, a quiet village in the flat, windy middle of Jutland. He built houses and furniture for the farmers around, and doors and windows, and anything else made of wood that people needed. He married, and he and his wife Kirstine had four sons.

Fire, and then the hard years

In 1924, a fire started by accident in the workshop. It spread to the family home, and both burned down.

Ole Kirk rebuilt, and bigger than before. But a few years later, the Great Depression reached Denmark. Farmers had no money, and nobody was ordering houses or furniture. Work at the workshop almost stopped.

Then, in 1932, Kirstine died. Ole Kirk was left alone, with four boys to raise and a business that was failing.

Toys

He looked around for anything he could make and sell. He made ironing boards and stepladders. And, with the wood left over, he began to make toys: yo-yos, pull-along animals, little cars and trucks.

Toys were not an obvious choice in the middle of a depression. Families had little money for them, and some people around him thought it was a foolish way for a grown man to make a living. Sometimes, it is said, he swapped toys for food when buyers had no cash.

But he enjoyed making them, and he made them well. In 1934 he gave the business a name, made from two Danish words, leg godt, which mean "play well". LEGO.

Only the best

His sons grew up in the workshop. Godtfred began helping as a boy. The episode of the ducks became a family lesson. A few years later, Godtfred carved the company's motto on a wooden sign for the workshop wall: "Only the best is good enough."

In 1942, during the German occupation of Denmark, fire struck again. This time the factory burned to the ground. The drawings, the models and the stock were all lost.

Ole Kirk was about fifty. He thought seriously about giving up. But he had employees who depended on him, and sons who were working beside him. He rebuilt the factory once more.

A machine for plastic

After the war, Ole Kirk took his biggest risk. In 1947 he bought a machine that could mould plastic, one of the first of its kind in Denmark. It cost a very large sum for a small village firm.

Among the things it made were small plastic building bricks that could clip together. At first, many shops were not interested. Plastic toys were new, and people thought of them as cheap and flimsy. Some of the bricks were sent back unsold.

The family kept improving them. Godtfred saw that the bricks could be the start of a whole "system" of play, where every piece fitted with every other. In January 1958, the company applied for a patent on a new design: a brick with studs on top and tubes inside, which held together firmly but could still be pulled apart.

Ole Kirk Christiansen died in March 1958, a few weeks after that patent was filed. He did not live to see what the brick would become.

What lasted

Two years later, in 1960, another fire destroyed the warehouse where the wooden toys were stored. Godtfred, who was now running the company, decided to stop making wooden toys and put everything into the bricks.

Today LEGO bricks are played with in almost every country in the world. The company is still owned by the family, and it is still based in Billund.

It began with a carpenter who lost his workshop twice, raised four sons alone, and once sent his own son back to the station so that a wooden duck would get its third coat of varnish.

Want to read more?

The LEGO Group's own website tells its history, from the joinery in Billund to the patented brick. Jonathan Bender's LEGO: A Love Story and David C. Robertson's Brick by Brick both describe the company's early years.