How Fires And Failure Almost Ended Lego

The year was 1916. Ole Kirk Christiansen, a master carpenter from Denmark, had just spent the last of his money buying a small shop and lumberyard in a rural town called Billund in South Jutland. This little business made custom furniture, window frames, stepladders, and farm structures for local families. There was not a single toy on any shelf, and there were no plans to put one there. Not yet. Not for another 16 years.

It was Sunday in 1924 when Ole Kirk’s sons, 4-year-old Karl Georg and his brother, 3-year-old Godtfred, were playing in the workshop while their parents slept. They accidentally set fire to dry wood shavings near a glue heater. The resulting fire burned down the shop and the attached family home. Ole Kirk rebuilt bigger, hiring an architect for a big brick workshop with carved stone lions at its entrance. But the bank debt from that venture nearly killed him.

The depression devastated the farming economy in Billund, Denmark, between 1929 and 1932. Ole Kirk’s carpentry business relied upon local farmers for customers. No money meant no new houses to build, repairs to make, or furniture to purchase. Orders dried up, and Ole Kirk was forced to lay off his employees. He didn’t turn to toys because he dreamed of making them. He turned to toys because he had nothing else to sell.

In 1932, Ole Kirk’s wife, Kirstine Sørensen, passed away, leaving him to care for four young sons on his own in the middle of the Depression. He didn’t remarry until two years later. He began making small wooden samples, miniature ironing boards and stepladders, in 1932 and realized the children were drawn to them. He turned the business over to making simple wooden pull-toys, trucks, and piggy banks, and sometimes bartered them to farmers for produce and meats rather than taking payment.

By 1934, Ole Kirk was seeking a more distinctive name for his wooden toy operation and held a competition for his employees, with a bottle of his own homemade wine as the prize. His entry won. He created the word Lego from the Danish leg godt (play well). It was much later before someone noticed that it’s also a Latin verb for “I assemble.” No one in Billund was thinking of Latin in 1934.

Ole Kirk’s first major success was a simple pull-along duck he created in 1935 that waddled along on little wooden wheels and moved its beak when a kid pulled it behind him. The wooden duck remained the company’s main product, staying in stores for a quarter of a century until the entire line of wooden toys was discontinued in 1960. Few of Lego’s other wooden toys matched its staying power.

Around 1937, Ole Kirk’s teenage son Godtfred, then about 17 years old, attempted to save money on a large order of wooden ducks by applying two coats of varnish instead of the required three. When Ole Kirk discovered the deception, he sent Godtfred bicycling to the train station to intercept the crates already in transit. He hauled the crates back to the workshop and applied the third coat of varnish himself, while Ole Kirk etched the phrase “Only the best is good enough” into the wall of the factory.

When Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Denmark in April 1940, supplies of beech wood, paint, and metal were restricted by wartime rationing for Ole Kirk’s workshop. With imported toys unavailable on Danish store shelves, families were eager to buy toys for their children, and demand for Lego’s homegrown wooden toys skyrocketed. The company’s staff nearly tripled in just a few years, expanding from 10 to 29.

Then, on March 20, 1942, an electrical short circuit during a storm sparked a massive fire that burned down Ole Kirk’s woodworking factory. The fire also destroyed all his original patterns and blueprints for his wooden toys. It was an accident caused by the storm, not an act of war. Ole Kirk felt responsible for his 15 employees and considered shutting down the business entirely. He didn’t.

With support from bank and town loans, Ole Kirk picked up the pieces on the very same site in Billund, Denmark, and by the end of 1942 had set up the nation’s first toy assembly line. He made it a joint-stock company two years later, inviting his four sons to sit as co-directors. The 1942 factory fire had been a tragedy, but it helped clear the way for the future.

It wasn’t until 1946 that Ole Kirk saw a British plastic injection molding machine being demonstrated at an industrial exhibition in Copenhagen, and knew that plastic was the future of toy-making. The following year he bought one of those machines for 30,000 Danish kroner, which was twice the amount the company made in profit the year before. It was known as the Windsor and was shipped to Billund in 1947. Ole Kirk’s sons, including Godtfred, thought he had committed a gross folly.

But in 1947, when Ole Kirk’s new plastic machine arrived in Billund from Britain, the shipment from his supplier included sample bricks designed by Hilary Fisher Page. Page, a British toy designer who had founded the company Kiddicraft, had patented a hollow plastic brick with round studs on top. Ole Kirk took the basic idea and made a few improvements. In 1949, he introduced his own plastic building block to the world, which he named Automatic Binding Bricks. The concept was not Ole Kirk’s. His genius was in execution.

When the new Automatic Binding Bricks arrived at Danish shops in 1949, they were seen as inferior novelties. They sold at low prices, but few parents bought them. Customers preferred the wooden toys that were more durable and traditional. As a result, shops returned many shipments, and the company still relied on wooden toy sales as its primary revenue.

In 1950, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, Ole Kirk’s son and the very same child who had skipped a coat of varnish to save money, became the Junior Managing Director on his 30th birthday. After his father suffered a debilitating stroke in 1951, he assumed control of day-to-day activities. That was just what the company needed.

Then, in the autumn of 1951, Lego released a highly detailed plastic model of a Ferguson TE20, a real farm tractor that was common on many post-war Scandinavian farms. It was a hit, an unexpected one. In 1952, Lego sold more plastic toys than wooden ones for the first time in its history. Ole’s 1947 gamble on the plastic machine, once a loser, was finally winning.

Then in 1954, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen was riding a ferry home from a toy fair in England when a buyer for a department store abroad told him that toy manufacturers only made one-off items that children quickly grew tired of playing with. Godtfred began daydreaming about a line of plastic building bricks that would be a system rather than individual toys. In 1955, Lego released the “Town Plan,” its first full system of building sets designed so every piece would work together. Every piece in the system was designed to work with every other, even though, for a few more years, the bricks themselves still wouldn’t hold together securely.

The hollow plastic bricks that Lego had been selling since 1949 didn’t hold well in play and could easily fall apart. Godtfred and his engineers worked for years to create tubes underneath each brick that gripped the studs above, giving the bricks real holding power. They filed the patent on January 28, 1958, for their innovative stud-and-tube design, which is what allows all Lego bricks to fit together to this day.

Less than two months after filing the stud-and-tube patent, Ole Kirk died of heart failure on March 11, 1958, at age 67, after years of declining health following a 1951 stroke. Godtfred became sole Managing Director. His brother Karl Georg oversaw production of plastic toys, and another brother, Gerhardt, oversaw wooden toys. Ole was alive long enough to see that the fix was in.

In 1959, Lego’s plastic sets generated more than twice the revenue of the wooden ones, and foreign buyers only knew the company as a manufacturer of plastic construction sets. In order to avoid confusing these overseas purchasers, the Lego brand was reserved solely for plastic bricks following an August 1959 organizational restructuring. Wooden items would be sold under a BILOfix sub-brand managed by Godtfred’s brother, Gerhardt. For now, though, there was still room for wood in the Lego factory.

During the night of February 4, 1960, a bolt of lightning hit Billund, Denmark. The resulting fire burned down the entire wooden toy factory and its warehouse, the third major fire in less than 40 years. Faced with the cost of rebuilding, Godtfred decided to scrap the wooden toys forever and focus solely on plastic. His brothers, Karl Georg and Gerhardt, opposed this decision. As a result, Godtfred bought out the brothers’ shares, and they both left the company.

This content was created with the help of AI.