Over 20 billion Lego blocks are made every year! These little colored plastic bricks can be assembled together to create many kinds of models including animals, buildings, and other objects. From its humble beginnings as a little toy shop in Denmark in 1916, to a big giant company that satisfy hundreds of millions of customers, it has a fascinating past. I will be talking about Lego’s history, how it is made, and other interesting facts about them.

In 1916, master carpenter Ole Kirk Christensen bought a woodworking shop in Denmark and started manufacturing stepladders, ironing boards, stools but mostly wooden toys. The name Lego was decided because Lego was an abbreviation for “leg godt,” which means play well in Danish. Starting in 1940, plastic toys were replacing wooden ones because wooden toys were more expensive, and heavy. The revolution of the Lego Company occurred when at 1947, the company started producing interlocking bricks that we know today.

Making Lego’s consists of 5 stages. It all starts with tiny plastic chunks called granules. Giant trucks carry many different colors of granules and deposit them into large silos that are inside the factory. Pipes then carry them to molding machines. Here the granules are melted and then molded into blocks. Finished pieces roll down conveyer belts into boxes. When a box is full, machine sends out a signal to robots trucks patrolling the hall. Then the robots carry them to another of the factory where blocks are assembled and decorated.

Automated robots put together multi-part pieces and a giant printer stamps faces, numbers, words, and other decorative details onto the bricks. The final step is to put all the right pieces together to make complete Lego kits. Kits can have hundreds of different pieces, so packaging has to be fast and accurate. Empty boxes are put onto conveyor belts, and the bins that hold all of the Lego pieces open and close to deposit the right amount of pieces into the boxes. Now the kits are ready to be sold in stores!

Even though the Lego company started a long time ago in 1916 and faced many hardships, now it is the one of the most popular businesses. As I mentioned before, making Lego’s consists of 5 steps. Kids and adults can be very creative with Lego, seeing that there are endless possibilities of models to build. So next time when you get out your Lego set out, you can think about how it arrived from the factory, to your house!