LEGO's 50th anniversary

Today is LEGO's 50th birthday, or rather the anniversary of the patent approval for the original brick. Joel Johnson has more at Boing Boing Gadgets, including a timeline of LEGO technology advances. From LEGO.com:

The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO – a fusion of the Danish words “LEg” and “GOdt” (“play well”).

Link and Link

• [Jeff]

  Google has a very cute little Lego logo.

• [Haldor]

  Best toy EVER!

• [Suburban Kamikaze]

  The hardest part of being a mom is knowing when to Lego:

  http://suburbankamikaze.typepad.com/suburban_kamikaze/2008/03/the-hardest-par.html

• [Moon]

  Am I the only one feeling LEGO-ed out?

  /A shout out to Sparkdale in the steampunk thread!

• [roguecnidarian]

  It figures: the same inscrutable Scandinavian minds that brought us the flat-pack to-it-yourself furniture would be the same ones that made the snap-together building toy!

  IKEA: legos for adults?

  Nah–no one ever really grows out of LEGOs.

• [racer x]

  I just heard on NPR that they had to sell Legoland because they haven’t been doing very well. That sucks for it to be on their birthday.