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Lego

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LEGO may also refer to the Low-End Graphics Option formerly sold by Sun Microsystems.
File:LEGO-logo.jpg
Lego Group logo
Lego sets feature a large variety of themed people (called “minifigures”), including the Space, Castle, and City figures above.

Lego is the name of a line of toys featuring colorful plastic bricks, gears, mini-figures, and other pieces which can be assembled to create models of almost anything imaginable. Cars, planes, trains, buildings, castles, sculptures, ships, spaceships, and even working robots are just a few of the many things that can be made with Lego bricks. High production quality and careful attention to detail ensures that Lego pieces can fit together in myriad ways, which is one of the main reasons for the toy's success.

The sets are produced by the LEGO Group, a privately-held company based in Denmark.

Manufacturing Lego pieces

Begining in 1963, the material used to create Lego bricks, cellulose acetate, was dropped in favor of more stable acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS plastic, which is still used today. ABS is non-toxic, less prone to discoloration and warping, and is also more resistant to heat, acids, salt, and other chemicals than cellulose acetate. Lego bricks manufactured from ABS plastic in 1963 still hold most of their shape and color 40 years later, and still neatly interlock with new Lego bricks.

Lego brick design can be deceptively simple. The vast array of pieces in the Lego System of Play seem to require no explanation; since they are made for children, they are designed to be so straightforward as to require little or no instruction in how to use them. To achieve such apparent simplicity, a considerable amount of engineering and precision manufacturing must go into the creation of each Lego piece.

There are many types of Lego bricks and pieces.

One of the key features of Lego bricks throughout their history is that they are, first and foremost, part of a system. Each new series and set that is released is compatible with the rest of the system; Lego pieces, regardless of their size, shape, or function, fit together with all other Lego pieces in some way. The gear and motor mechanisms that come with the most advanced Technic sets, designed for teenagers, can be almost effortlessly attached to the DUPLO bricks designed for three-year-old children. This characteristic enables the Lego system to grow and adapt as children get older; the infinite possibilities presented by the system keep many adults fascinated, as well.

Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. As of 2003, molding is done at one of two plants in Denmark and Switzerland. Brick decorations and packaging may be done at plants in Denmark, Switzerland, U.S., South Korea and the Czech Republic. Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 20 billion (2 × 1010) per year, or about 600 per second.

Bricks, beams, axles, minifigures, and all other elements in the Lego system are manufactured to an exacting degree of tolerance. When snapped together, pieces must have just the right amount of "clutch power"; they must stay together until pulled apart. They cannot be too easy to pull apart, or the result will be Lego creations that are unstable; they cannot be too difficult to pull apart, since the disassembly of one creation in order to build another is part of the Lego appeal. In order for pieces to have just the right "clutch power", Lego elements are manufactured within a tolerance of 2 micrometres (0.00008 in).

One of the techniques that help to maintain this high degree of quality is the small capacity of the molds; some toy companies, in order to cut manufacturing costs, use molds capable of stamping out 60 pieces at a time. Lego molds generally have a much smaller capacity, and are precision-machined, often costing tens of thousands of dollars. The injection molds are equipped with sensors to detect fluctuations in pressure and temperature, either of which can degrade the quality of the resulting piece. Human inspectors meticulously check the output of the molds, to ensure that there are no significant variations in color or thickness. Worn-out molds are encased in the foundations of buildings to prevent their falling into competitors' hands. According to the Lego Group, its molding processes are so accurate that only 18 bricks out of every million fail to meet its stringent standards. It is thanks to this care in manufacturing that the Lego Group has maintained such a high degree of quality over the decades; it is also part of the reason that pieces manufactured over 40 years ago still interlock neatly with pieces manufactured today.

A model of Trafalgar Square in London can be found in Legoland Windsor.

Lego today

Since it began producing plastic bricks, the LEGO Group has released many thousands of play sets themed on space, robots, pirates, medieval castles, dinosaurs, cities, suburbia, holiday locations, the Wild West, the Arctic, boats, racing cars, trains, Star Wars, Harry Potter and more. New pieces are being released constantly, allowing Lego sets to become more and more versatile.

There are also motors, gears, lights, sensors, and cameras available to be used with Lego components. There are even special bricks, like the LEGO RCX that can be programmed with a personal computer to perform very complicated and useful tasks. These programmable bricks are sold under the name Lego Mindstorms. There is also a FIRST Lego League for elementry and middle schools, in which contestants can compete their robotic entries in a competition that changes anually. The 2005 challenge was entitled No Limits, in which kids programmed their robots to acomplish household tasks that people with disabilities might have trouble with.

Lego bricks have now been used for purposes beyond play. A cult following of people who have used Lego pieces to make sculptures, very large mosaics and complex machines has developed. Some sculptures use hundreds of thousands of pieces and weigh tens of kilograms. Large mosaics, fully functional padlocks and pendulum clocks, and even a harpsichord have been constructed from Lego pieces. One such masterpiece solves a Rubik's Cube through the use of Lego motors and cameras, a task that many humans cannot accomplish. Photos of many fan creations like these can be seen at Brickshelf and at MOCpages. A group which calls itself "AFOLs" (for "Adult Fans of Lego") is an important demographic for The Lego Group, which has recently begun reintroducing popular sets from previous years to appeal to this group.

Lego toys have been used in a number of unexpected ways. For example, at The Brick Testament the 'Reverend' Brendan Powell Smith has painstakingly built the Bible in Lego pieces. The site features over 2,000 photographs of Biblical scenes. The website theory.org.uk (by academic David Gauntlett) features Lego versions of social theorists. A set of software tools called LDraw can be used to model possible Lego creations in 3D. Because of the high degree of uniformity in Lego bricks, they have also been used in fields such as computer vision, in which knowing the exact dimensions and relative positions of objects is useful for creating test data.

The Lego system in art

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The Walt Disney World Resort features a sculpture of the Loch Ness Monster made of Lego bricks.

One hobby among enthusiasts is to re-create popular scenes from famous movies, using Lego bricks for the scenery and Lego play sets as characters. Such movies are called "Lego movies", "brickfilms", or "cinema Lego". For example, the Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD contained a version of the "Camelot" musical sequence redone with Lego minifigures and accessories.

Artists have also used Lego sets with one of the more notorious examples being Polish artist Zbigniew Libera's "Lego Concentration Camp," a collection of mocked-up concentration camp-themed Lego sets.[1]

Another notable example is the award-winning Music video for the song "Fell in Love With a Girl" by the White Stripes. Director Michel Gondry filmed a live version of the video, digitized the result, and then recreated it entirely with Lego bricks.

Several webcomics are illustrated with Lego, notably Irregular Webcomic!.

Lego itself sells a line of sets named "Lego Studios," which contain a Lego web cam (repackaged Logitech USB Quickcam), software to record video on a computer, clear plastic rods which can be used to manipulate minifigures from off-camera, and a minifigure resembling Steven Spielberg.

The Lego trademark

The LEGO Group's name has become so synonymous with its flagship toy that many use the words "Lego" or "Legos" to refer to the bricks themselves, and even to any plastic bricks resembling Lego bricks, although the Lego Group discourages such dilution of their trademark name. Lego catalogs in the 1970s and 1980s contained a note that read:

The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you! Susan Williams, Consumer Services.

"Lego" is officially written in all uppercase letters. The company asserts that to protect its brand name, the word Lego must always be used as an adjective, as in "LEGO set," "LEGO products," "LEGO universe," and so forth. Nevertheless, such corporate admonitions are frequently ignored as corporate intervention in the use of language, and the word lego is commonly used both as a noun to refer to Lego bricks as well as as a generic noun referring to any kind of interlocking toy brick.

Trivia

  • "Legot" (or "leegot"), plural form of "lego" (or "leego") is also used as a Finnish slang term for human teeth, because of the rectangular shape of the teeth.
  • Six eight-stud Lego bricks of the same color can be put together in 915,103,765 ways, and just three bricks of the same color offer 1,060 combinations. A Lego Counting problem

See also

References

  • Henry Wiencek, The World of LEGO® Toys. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-8109-2362-9.
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