Lego Building Block Patent See the video & story Email to a Friend Founder Cole Borders turns original hand drawn patents into incredible art prints. PatentPrints feature inventions from specialized professional tools to once-novel items that are now part of our everyday life. Bring a bit of style and history to your home or office, or give one as a meaningful gift. Made in the USA: Bowling Green, KY Sophisticated and elegant patent design based on products you love High quality, heavyweight stock paper that produces the vivid colors. Archival inks for long lasting prints and rich color Style of patent is based on Henry Ford's transmission patent, filed in 1930 Printed on demand and inspected by 3 sets of eyes to ensure the highest quality Product is placed inside a plastic sleeve and then packaged in a hard shipping tube for double the protection Dimensions: 24" x 36" or 16" x 20" Reviews ( out of 5 Grommets) My brother loved the print!
He is tough to shop for too. Perfect for the Lego lover I got this print for my husband for Christmas! He couldn't stop staring at the impressive print and just thought it was awesome! Exactly like the picture Cant wait to get it framed. Great for a lego enthusiast. I bought this and framed it for my son who got his first "driver's license" from Legoland. He has since gotten advanced degrees in... Items 1 to 5 of 13 total/2016/09/07/world/lego-puts-brakes-after-decade-growth/popout" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="240px">The Danish company Lego, the world’s most profitable toymaker, has an enviable problem: Business has been so good in recent years, it can’t keep up with demand.This led the company to actually scale back on advertising last year, in an attempt to slow sales and buy time to ramp up production. “We feel we need to invest in some breathing space,” Lego Chief Financial Officer John Goodwin said in a statement.So the question remains, is it strange that Lego would try to put the brakes on all that momentum?“
Not necessarily odd, but I think it's very representative of the development of a large corporation,” said Stephanie Wissink, a toy industry analyst at Piper Jaffray.Up until this point, Lego has been able to increase production relatively organically, and it's simply shot past that capacity, primarily thanks to a series of savvy branding partnerships.“Things like "Star Wars" or Minecraft, Marvel, partnerships that they have with large media companies where they’re able to piggyback,” Wissink said.That turnaround was characterized by unprecedented growth, including increases in revenue of 15 percent per year for the past 12 years. That's unheard of, says BMO Capital Markets analyst Gerrick Johnson.“They sell a plastic brick,” he said. “There is no patent protection on this brick, anyone can make this brick. Yet the fact that they have been able to grow demand for that long is a tribute to their innovation."Normally, Johnson notes, kids grow up, toys fall out fashion, but “I’m not sure you’re going to see a sales collapse with Lego.”
The company is in the process of building its first factory in China. Lego also hired some 3,500 employees in the first half of the year, increasingly its global workforce to 18,500 worldwide.LEGO is 50 years old today (precisely at 1:58 pm, actually, when the original patent was filed in Denmark). The plastic toy building brick is everywhere - LEGO has thousands of sets with all sorts of themes, from Star Wars to Harry Potter models. To commemorate the half century mark of the popular toy, Neatorama has compiled a 10 Neatest LEGO Facts and Links:The LEGO toy empire got started in 1932 when Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter, almost went bankrupt. During a depression, he had lost so much carpentry business that he started making wooden toys and selling them from his workshop. Two years later, he named his company LEGO (from Danish words "leg godt" meaning "play well". Incidentally, lego also means "I put together" in Latin.)A wooden toy duck.Ole Kirk didn't invent those LEGO bricks.
He was inspired by the "Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Brick" patented by British inventor Hilary Fisher Page years earlier. LEGO's first bricks, called the Automatic Binding Bricks, were released in 1947 and were almost exact copies of the Kiddicraft block.Many years later, after Page committed suicide over business troubles, LEGO bought all the rights to the Kiddicraft block. In 1961, LEGO was awarded its first US patent for "Toy Building Brick." The design calls for a hollow rectangular bricks with studs on top and a round hollow tube on the bottom. This was a marked improvement, as it allows for the precise "tube and stud" coupling. The first minifigures (or minifigs) were released in 1978 for the Town, Space, and Castle playsets. When they were first created, LEGO decided that their (always happy) faces should have only one color: yellow. Minifigs have no sex or race. Actually, they didn't have any arms or movable legs either.In the 1980s, with the arrival of the LEGO Pirates, new facial features (evil/good/happy/grumpy) were released.
In 2003, the company released different skin colors for the LEGO Basketball.Every year, about 19 billion LEGO bricks are produced. That translates to 2.16 million LEGO elements are molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute! The LEGO manufacturing process is so precise that only 18 out of 1 million LEGO bricks produced is considered defective.The melted ABS is struck at a pressure of 25 tons to 150 tons -- depending on the type of brick being made -- with the metal molds. The intense force is important to the process, as it ensures that the bricks are accurately shaped.Oh, and did you know that LEGO manufactures about 306 million tiny rubber tires every year? That's more than any other tire manufacturers in the world!Link: The Making of a LEGO Brick, a photo gallery by Joseph Pisani at BusinessWeekPerhaps it's the company's name, spelled in all capital letters, that inspired LEGO lovers to use a multitude of acronyms when they talk about their beloved toy. Here are some examples:AFOL: Adult Fan of LEGOBFC: Big Freaking CastleBURP: Big Ugly Rock PieceHOG: Hand of God, when you move your minifigs around, this is what they think of your handLF and NLF: LEGO Friend and Non-LEGO Friend LS and NLS: LEGO Spouse and Non-LEGO Spouse (guess which one approves of the LEGO hobby)MOC: My Own CreationConsider these amazing statistics
, courtesy of LEGO - Thanks Alisa Weinstein! - There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants.- Children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.- More than 400 million people around the world have played with LEGO bricks.- More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949. Stacked on top of each other, this is enough to connect the Earth and the Moon ten times over.- 7 LEGO sets are sold by retailers every second around the world.- The LEGO bricks sold in one year would circle the world 5 times.While each LEGO creation is a testament of the builder's creativity, Nathan Sawaya's creations have elevated building with LEGO to an artform. The former corporate lawyer quit his job in 2001 to focus on becoming the world's foremost LEGO artist. Sawaya's art show The Art of the Brick is currently touring North American museums.Nathan Sawaya posing with his sculpture titled Gray (2006)Previously on Neatorama: posts featuring Nathan Sawaya.Given people's passion when it comes to the toy, it's not surprising that there are many world records set with LEGO, for example:- World's tallest LEGO tower at 94.3 ft (28.7 m) with 465,000 bricks- World's Longest LEGO Construction at 5,179.8 ft (1,578.8 m) with 2.9 million bricks- World's Largest LEGO Image at 870.15 ft² (80.84 m²)