In 1932 carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen founded his company in Billund, Denmark with the purpose of encouraging imaginative play and ingenuity among children. The company began by manufacturing stepladders. However, the Great Depression forced him into an agile business model. He turned his attention on the manufacture of toys, and created one of history’s most beloved brands.
Christiansen was a naive man who was quick to adopt new materials and technologies. In 1947, he became the first company to purchase an injection molding machine made of plastic in the world. This significantly boosted the capabilities and selection of Lego products. The machine also allowed him to explore a design that would later become the iconic Lego brick. The bricks were hollow on the bottom and had pegs at the top. They were interlocked to let children create intricate structures that were more intricate than those made using wooden blocks from earlier generations.
The 1950s was a time of growth for the company. Godtfred Kirk Christiansen’s daughter Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen joined the management team and she began to modernize the manufacturing processes of the company. This expansion saw the introduction of a dollhouse line and https://lego-x.com/2020/02/22/a-brief-history-of-the-creation-of-the-lego-constructor furniture for girls as well as the very first minifigures that were sold as individual pieces. In 1979, the company branched out into space by introducing sets of astronaut minifigures, rockets lunar rovers and spaceships and into the medieval world with a castle theme.
In 1990 the company released three Model Team sets that were made for advanced builders. These sets included small parts like gears, axles, and levers, and provided an amount of realisticity and accuracy that was unparalleled in the Lego series at the time.