This article is about the construction lego black friday deals 2020. For the company, see The Lego Group.

For the Italian newspaper, see Leggo. The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Movies, games, competitions and eight Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand. Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1947, Lego expanded to begin producing plastic toys. By 1954, Christiansen’s son, Godtfred, had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group.

It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that led to the idea of a toy system. The Lego Group’s Duplo product line was introduced in 1969 and is a range of simple blocks whose lengths measure twice the width, height, and depth of standard Lego blocks and are aimed towards younger children. In 1978, Lego produced the first minifigures, which have since become a staple in most sets. 1:1 scale model of an X-wing fighter. In February 2015, marketing consulting company Brand Finance ranked Lego as the “world’s most powerful brand”, overtaking Ferrari. Lego’s popularity is demonstrated by its wide representation and usage in many forms of cultural works, including books, films and art work. It has even been used in the classroom as a teaching tool.

In the US, Lego Education North America is a joint venture between Pitsco, Inc. In 1998, Lego bricks were one of the original inductees into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York. Lego bricks are commonly called “legos”, but this is discouraged by the company. Lego pieces of all varieties constitute a universal system. Despite variation in the design and the purposes of individual pieces over the years, each piece remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made in the current time, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers.

Each Lego piece must be manufactured to an exacting degree of precision. When two pieces are engaged they must fit firmly, yet be easily disassembled. The machines that manufacture Lego bricks have tolerances as small as 10 micrometres. Primary concept and development work takes place at the Billund headquarters, where the company employs approximately 120 designers. The company also has smaller design offices in the UK, Spain, Germany, and Japan which are tasked with developing products aimed specifically at these markets. The average development period for a new product is around twelve months, split into three stages.

Lego Digital Designer is an official piece of Lego software for Mac OS X and Windows which allows users to create their own digital Lego designs. Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at several locations around the world. Monterrey, Mexico and, most recently, in Jiaxing, China. In December 2012, the BBC’s More or Less radio program asked the Open University’s engineering department to determine “how many Lego bricks, stacked one on top of the other, it would take for the weight to destroy the bottom brick? Private tests have shown several thousand assembly-disassembly cycles before the bricks begin to wear out, although Lego tests show fewer cycles.

In 2020 the company announced that it would cease packaging its products in single-use plastic bags, and would instead be using recyclable paper bags. Over the years, Lego has licensed themes from numerous cartoon and film franchises and even some from video games. For the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Lego released a special Team GB Minifigures series exclusively in the United Kingdom to mark the opening of the games. One of the largest Lego sets commercially produced was a minifig-scaled edition of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon. Designed by Jens Kronvold Fredericksen, it was released in 2007 and contained 5,195 pieces. It was surpassed by a 5,922-piece Taj Mahal.

In 2022, Lego introduced the Eiffel Tower, the set consists of 10,000 parts and reaches a height of 149 cm, which makes it the tallest set and the tallest tower, but the second in number of parts after the “World Map”. Main articles: Lego Mindstorms, Lego Mindstorms NXT, Lego Mindstorms NXT 2. Lego also initiated a robotics line of toys called ‘Mindstorms’ in 1999, and has continued to expand and update this range ever since. The programmable Lego brick which is at the heart of these robotics sets has undergone several updates and redesigns, with the latest being called the ‘EV3’ brick, being sold under the name of Lego Mindstorms EV3. The set includes sensors that detect touch, light, sound and ultrasonic waves, with several others being sold separately, including an RFID reader. The intelligent brick can be programmed using official software available for Windows and Mac computers, and is downloaded onto the brick via Bluetooth or a USB cable.

There are several robotics competitions which use the Lego robotics sets. The earliest is Botball, a national U. The capabilities of the Mindstorms range have now been harnessed for use in Iko Creative Prosthetic System, a prosthetic limbs system designed for children. Designs for these Lego prosthetics allow everything from mechanical diggers to laser-firing spaceships to be screwed on to the end of a child’s limb.