Ole Kirk Christiansen

Ole Kirk Christiansen was a carpenter in Billund, a village in Jutland, whose workshop burned down in 1924 and whose furniture business failed in the Depression. In 1932, with four sons and no work, he started making wooden toys — ducks, pull-along animals, yo-yos — and in 1934 named the firm Lego, from the Danish leg godt, play well. His motto, carved over the workshop door and still on the wall in Billund, was det bedste er ikke for godt: only the best is good enough. The story the company tells is that when his son Godtfred saved varnish by giving a batch of ducks two coats instead of three, Ole made him unpack the crates and do them again.

The decision that made the company came in 1947, when he spent DKK 30,000 — more than the previous year's profit, and borrowed — on Denmark's first plastic injection-moulding machine. He had no clear idea what to make with it. The first bricks, in 1949, were close copies of the Kiddicraft self-locking bricks that a British designer, Hilary Page, had patented in the 1940s; Lego bought the Kiddicraft rights only in 1981, and the copying is the contested part of the founding. Danish retailers did not want plastic and sent the early bricks back. The wooden toys carried the firm for another decade.

What Ole Kirk did not do was invent the system. That was Godtfred, who in 1955 declared the Lego System of Play — every element compatible with every other — and who filed the stud-and-tube patent on 28 January 1958. Ole Kirk died six weeks later, in March 1958. The father bought the machine and set the standard; the son built the thing that made the company. The 1960 fire that destroyed the wooden-toy warehouse, and Godtfred's decision not to rebuild it, completed the turn into a one-product company, and the fact that Lego's founder never saw the brick become its business is worth remembering when the company describes its own origins.