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LEGO brick

The plastic building brick with studs on top and tubes underneath, patented by the LEGO Group in 1958 and still made to the same coupling.

Designed by
Godtfred Kirk Christiansen
Made by
LEGO
First made
1958

Visit lego.com

A red 2x4 LEGO brick
A red 2x4 LEGO brick
Drawing of two bricks with the tubes inside
Drawing of two bricks with the tubes inside

Pictures © LEGO, from lego.com.

Why it is renowned

The LEGO brick was among the toys taken into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 1998, and in 2000 Fortune magazine and the British Association of Toy Retailers each named it Toy of the Century.12 The Young V&A in London shows LEGO System bricks from the 1960s in its Play Gallery.3 The Strong puts the number of bricks made at more than 320 billion.1

The story

The LEGO Group had made hollow plastic bricks since 1949, but models built with them were not stable, and the markets complained.45 At a meeting on 23 January 1958 Godtfred Kirk Christiansen sketched several answers, among them tubes inside the brick that grip the studs of the brick below; the company filed its patent application for the design on 28 January 1958.4 The United States patent, number 3,005,282, titled "Toy building brick", was granted to him in 1961.6 Since 1963 the bricks have been moulded in ABS plastic on machines that work to tolerances as small as ten micrometres, and a brick from 1958 still fits one made today.5 Six bricks of two by four studs can be put together in 915,103,765 ways.4

  • LEGO House, the LEGO Group's house in Billund, built like stacked bricks
Sources
  1. LEGO, National Toy Hall of Fame. toyhalloffame.org, read 29 September 2026.
  2. The LEGO Group history. lego.com, read 28 September 2026.
  3. LEGO System, V&A Explore The Collections. collections.vam.ac.uk, read 29 September 2026.
  4. The stud and tube principle, LEGO History. lego.com, read 29 September 2026.
  5. Lego, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org, read 28 September 2026.
  6. US3005282A, Toy building brick. patents.google.com, read 29 September 2026.

Last checked 5 October 2026, against the maker's own pages.