How Did LEGO Take Over the World?

it's true. Actually I found this analysis from a couple of years back, and it shows that over the previous decade and a half, Lego sets that are still in pristine condition, I've seen a twelve percent increase in value each year over that time. Now that growth beats gold, which I know you like to look into a good bit as well, that's grown nine point six percent annually, and then D S and P five hundred, which grew by a little more than four percent each year over

that time. And actually, if you look on eBay, some of the returns on this are even more extreme. There's the old Cafe Corner set which was released in two thousand seven. It's worth more than three thousand dollars on some of these eBay bids. And then there's also that crazy Ultimate Collectors Millennium Falcon seth from that same year. It's not worth more than four thousand dollars. So think about that, man, Think about how much money you could

be making from this. I know I really should have been a hoarder in the early two thousand's, But is this better than like holding onto baseball cards or like beanie babies? Mago? This is not a fad. Lego is a way of life, you know, I don't actually I don't know why I just said that or what that even means. But we should probably do a little bit

more research on this. But it is really interesting to see, and you know, seeing those stats on Lego and the fact that millions of Lego pieces are molded every single hour, it made us wonder how Lego got to be the massive brand that it is today. You know, what are the most amazing things to be built from Lego bricks? How have they been used to solve real world problems? And of course, what is the science behind the excruciating pain brought on by stepping on one of these things?

So let's dive in. Ya Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always, I'm joined by my good friend Manues Ticket and on the other side of the soundproof glass, with only a couple of hundred or so pieces left on his Lego Taj Mahal, that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil now. Building this thing has been no small feet for Tristan because the Taj is actually one of the biggest lego sets ever produced. It's just shy of six thousand pieces.

So you know, while that finished model does look pretty stunning, he's definitely had his work cut out for him. Yeah, I mean, he told me the bill takes about twenty five hours total and he's pretty much spent all week on it. The crazy thing, though, is that the taj Mall isn't even the biggest lego set on the market. There's a bigger one that just came out based on the Hogwarts Castle from Harry Potter that only has about

forty more pieces. But then there's also this Millennium Falcon one that came out last year and it's actually the set with the highest piece count to date. It's got a whopping seven thousand, five one pieces, and of course, if Tristan wants to make that his next challenge, I'll have to sholl out eight hundred dollars to make it happen. Good grief. Wow, Well, I'm guessing that's a little out of his Lego budget. I hope it's a little out

of his Lego budget. But you know, I know, Lego mania can be a pretty powerful thing when it takes hold, not to mention expensive. And you know, is it by chance that Lego has held steady as the world's most valuable toy brand for the past several years. Now, those little plastic pieces, you know, they give these endless opportunities for creative play, and that flexibility is definitely captured the imaginations of kids and adults alike for you know, more

than half a century, that's right. In fact, this year actually marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Lego brick as we know it, as well as the fort anniversary of the Lego Mini figures that populated our Lego towns and pilot our Lego spaceships. So to kind of celebrate all those milestones, I think now is the perfect time to break down the little known history behind one of the

world's most popular playthings. Well, definitely, because for as long lived as these two figures are the Lego Brick and the Mini figure, the company itself is actually a fair bit older, so today we definitely want to dig into those early origins as well as some of the different ways the brand has managed to reinvent itself throughout the years, and a little bit later we'll also check out a few of the more creative ways that Lego fans have

found to put their favorite bricks to good use. But first, Lego, I know you wanted to give a quick note on terminology, right yeah, And I know it's a little weird to be a stickler about terms when discussing a kids to it, but one of our researchers was adamant about this. I'm going to tell you, like how you said, one of our researchers like, we don't know, it's gay. Of course, you know, I want to avoid another lecture from him,

so but it is kind of interesting. So the first thing to keep in mind is that the word Lego is actually an adjective, not a noun. And this is something that's even reflecting the name of the company, which isn't simply Lego but the Lego Group. And if the company had its way no one would ever refer to one of their pieces as a Lego, but as a

Lego brick, And of course that doesn't always happen. Lots of people just use the word on soone when talking about the pieces, and that little slip up usually gets a pass from the company and its fans, so long as you don't compound the problem by adding an s to the word to make it plural. And apparently that's beyond the pale for most people, because the true plural of Lego is just lego, never legos. All right, okay, well,

we will try our best, I think. I mean, there are times where I'm just thinking, you know what, I'm just gonna say Legos, Lego, lego, like to see how much we can drive them crazy. But I think we'll try to stick to those ground rules. And now that we've gotten the semantics out of the way, let's go back to a time before the Lego brick, and actually before the company itself, because the family business that would eventually become the Lego Group was actually established under a

different name. Now this was back in August of nineteen thirty two. It's located in a rural village in Denmark, and the business was started by this master carpenter and woodworker named Old Kirk Christiansen. Now, in those early years, Old Kirk made a living selling things like step ladders and stools, even ironing boards, but the business was slow.

This was you know, think about the timing. This was during the Great Depression that had been brought on by America's stock market crash just a few years earlier, and so few people had the money to buy these expensive or handmade furniture pieces, and so Old Kirk was struggling to turn a profit with his woodwork. So I'm just gonna guess here, that's when he came up with this

idea for wooden building blocks. I mean, this was nineteen thirty two, so so the wooden building blocks had been around for for quite some time at least by that point. But the depression did motivate Oldkirk to seek out new product ideas, which is what ultimately led him into the toy business. So he thought that, you know, despite the financial strains of the era, people were willing to indulge their children with the occasional gift, of course, provided the

price was low enough. But that spurtle Kirk to whip up his own batch of brightly colored wooden cars and animals, and this was really just using the wooden scraps from his workshop. That's pretty awesome. I love that the Great

Depression basically turned him into this like real life Geppetto. Yeah, I definitely did, and that move it seemed like a safe bet to Old Kirk, But sales pretty much stayed flat for the first year, and in fact, Old Kirk even went bankrupt at one point and had to take a bailout loan from his siblings, but they actually insisted one of the conditions for the loan was that their brother would give up on toys and go back to

making furniture. But Old Kirk was pretty stubborn and he refused, but somehow managed to get them to loan the money anyway, and he had become convinced that toys were the future of his company. All he needed was just a catchier name. And you can decide whether you think he needed to catch your name. The name of his business was the Bill and Machine Joinery and Carpentry Business. Wait, so that's what the shop was called after they switched to toymaking.

It feels weird, like, like why would they think that would work. I know, well, thankfully all Kirk came up with something much more evocative later on by truncating the Danish expression like god, which means play well, he landed on the word lego. So I actually took Latin in school, and I always heard that lego was the Latin phrase for I put together. So here's the weird thing. You're actually right about that that is the meaning in Latin.

But that was actually just a happy accident, because apparently all Kirk found out about this years later that this is what it meant in Latin. But no matter what he thought, it meant. That renaming effort definitely paid off for the company, and it quickly grew from what was a six person operation in nineteen thirty four more than forty employees by the early forties. Now, much of that growth was due to the national popularity of Old Kirk's

adorable line of poll toys. You've definitely seen these kinds of things before. You know, You've got the hand painted wooden duck on wheels that it open and closed its beak that you know as you pulled the string, and pretty neat to see those things. But anyway, the Lego ducks sold for barely more than a dollar at that point. This was when they were released in nineteen thirty five, but as one of those earliest and most recognizable Lego products. If you got your hands on one of these things.

These days, a single duck can fetch more than two thousand dollars at auction. It's so funny because like, these are things that you see in like villages in India, these pull toys. They don't feel that special. What made them change from like wooden ducks to plastic bricks. It definitely wasn't overnight. It was a pretty gradual change, and

much of it was brought on by necessity. So in Denmark they've been under German occupation during the Second World War, and by the time the war finally ended in nineteen many of those materials that were traditionally used for consumer goods, you think things like steel and wood, they were tough to come by, and so that was a problem actually all over the globe, not just there in Denmark. Now, the result of the shortages was that many manufacturers started

experimenting with a new development in plastics. This was called plastic injected molding, and this is that process where melted plastic is shot into a precise mold of whatever it is that you're trying to make, and then once it cools and solidifies, you simply pop them out and you've

got your finished item. And so it was a much cheaper and faster way to make these plastic goods compared to earlier ways of doing this, and so this breakthrough is really what made plastics a viable alternative for the manufacturers at that time. So all Kirk had felt the pinch from the lack overaw materials, so he decided that the Lego companies should take a chance on plastic toys.

So you fast forward a little bit to and he placed in order with the UK company for what ended up being one of the first plastic injection molding machines. And the only problem was that the material shortage had led the Danish government to ban the commercial use of

that machine until the following year. Fortunately they decided to spend their time wisely, so old Kirk and his son Gottfried were we're still able to experiment with the machine and kind of study the various sample products that have been included with it, and we're really trying to see what they could make from it. Well, one product that they stumbled into was this set of self locking building bricks and it was made by a British company called

Kitta Craft. So they had these colorful two by two two by four bricks that had this special design features that set them apart from the traditional cube shaped building blocks of the past, because each one was hollow on the bottom and had these four raised studs on the top. This probably all sounds pretty familiar, and so the design added stability to whatever structures the kids built because the

studs held each brick in place. So this is obviously really interesting to me, but I'm not sure I like where it's going. I feel like I'm a little worried that you'rena telling me that Lego just didn't invent the Lego brick, but they just kind of stole this idea, and I'm not sure I can handle that sort of disappointment. And I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle on this one, because once the Christiansen's were finally allowed to put their machine to work, that's exactly what

they did. In fact, by nine, the Lego Company was producing around two hundred different plastic and wooden toys, and many of the plastic ones were simply new versions of earlier designs, so things like the plastic planes or trains or you know, different things like that. But among the repeats was this new but somewhat familiar product called automatic binding bricks. And as you feared, Mango, these were really just a copy of these bricks made by Kittacraft with

a few small changes. But actually the lego version was was honestly a bit inferior to the original the company. You know, they just weren't used to making such small parts and the technology was still pretty new to them, and so as a result of this, many of those hollow Lego bricks were prone to cracking or shrinking, which is weird to think about now because they just seemed so indestructible in these days. But you know, actually sometimes it was so bad that once the plastic had cooled,

the bricks didn't even fit together. I mean, I guess they're always growing pains, but it does feel crazy that, like, if you're gonna rip someone else's idea off, at least do a good job of it, right. That's always been my philosophy. When I try to rip people off but you know, you put the shottiness aside. I do want to say an old Kirk's defense that Kittacraft bricks weren't protected by a patent in Denmark, and the company reportedly said it was fine for them to use the design.

And one other thing. It is worth noting that the Lego group did eventually buy the rights to the Kittacraft bricks from the inventor's descendants, and this was sometime in the early eighties. I think, oh, that's interesting, So maybe there was like a little bit of guilty conscience in there going on, but it's still nice to hear that they made it right. And I am curious though, if those automatic binding bricks were such poor quality, like what

made them such a big hit? Well, they definitely weren't at first, and this was true the company's plastic toys in general during the early nineteen fifties, and at that time roughly half of all Lego sales were still from wooden toys, whereas you know, you look at the Lego binding bricks at that time, they actually only accounted for like five or six percent of their sales. And so to help turn this around, the Christiansen has made a

few key changes. First, in nineteen fifty three, they ditched that austere sounding name and actually started calling the product Lego Merston or Lego Bricks. And so by this time Godfried was starting to take on a much larger role in the company. He became really interested in finding a clear focus for the company rather than kind of spreading

those resources across so many different kinds of products. So he eventually decided that the adaptability, that wide appeal, and really the ease of production for something like Lego Bricks made it the ideal choice. But still, even then, the bricks weren't a hot seller yet, so there was obviously room for improvement. So Godfried and his father started tinkering with the bricks design, and in nineteen fifty seven they

really stumbled onto their winning idea. Now, this breakthrough was to add tubes to the otherwise hollow interior of the bricks, so that the studs had something to connect to. And so these new studs and tubes that that kind of allowed these bricks to snap together and hold tight and and and of course still be able to pull apart pretty easily when you try to pull them apart. And so the company later called this clutch power. Sounds really strong,

doesn't it, But it's clutch power. But I mean, it is pretty amazing how they were able to pull this off. But sadly, old Kirk didn't get to see just how much of a game changer this new design would be because they actually passed away the very next year. This was in ninety, which was also when Lego Bricks as

we know them today we're first released. So I know we mentioned earlier that's the sixtieth anniversary for Lego Bricks, but it is weird to think that it's the sixtieth anniversary of the death of the company's founder as well. I mean, that's kind of bitter sweet. Yeah, it was definitely the end of an era for the company. And actually just a couple of years after the US there was a fire that broke out on the Lego warehouse and the company lost pretty much all of their inventory

of wooden toys. So it really kind of rushed a decision they probably would have come to anyway, and they just decided to close the books on the wooden toys and really place all their bets on the future of these plastic toys. That's pretty well so I know, Godfrey took over after old Kirk's passing, and he definitely took care of his father's legacy, like he helped the company find a core product with that new style of bricks, and the design was such a sound one that it

stayed exactly the same for sixty years now. So you can actually go out and buy a Lego set today and the bricks would all interlock perfectly with the ones released or any years since then. And this connected quote

system of play as they call it. You know, it was really revolutionary and it's still the driving force behind, you know, the appeal of Lego products, not to mention the retail success, and it's hard to think of any other company that had been creating products, you know, fifties sixty years ago, oh that would still be usable in any way with something that they're making now. So it's

pretty remarkable. But you know, apart from being in a related there, there's another big appeal of Lego bricks, and that's their durability, because it turns out that a typical two by four Lego brick can be put together and taken apart more than thirty seven thousand times before they lose that clutch that we talked about before, But we know this thanks to a software developer named Philippe Canton.

So a few years back, he built this stress test machine that would continuously assemble and disassemble to Lego bricks, and this happened for ten days straight. Then finally, after thirty seven thousand, one and twelve rounds of this, Canton found that the bricks, studs, and tubes had become so worn out that they no longer held together. So it is possible to wear out your Lego bricks, but unless you have a really bizarre sense of fun, I don't

think it's going to happen anytime soon. So I definitely hadn't heard about that experiment before, but I did come across this other stunt test where this group of engineer is trying to figure out exactly how much weight a two by two Lego brick can endure before it finally breaks, which obviously sounds like a very worthy endeavor for these engineers, But they basically took this hydraulic ram and used it to apply different levels of force to the brick, and

in the end, a single two by two Lego brick was able to withstand a staggering four thousand, two hundred forty Newton's of force, which is equal to about nine hundred fifty pounds. It's not astounding, But the coolest part is that once the team had that figured out, they were able to work out the number of Lego bricks you could safely stack before they just collapse under their

own weight. And when you do the math, it turns out that a single Lego bricks should be able to support a whopping three hundred seventy five thousand other bricks. And if you somehow managed to stack that many bricks straight up, you'd wind up with a tower that's over two miles tall. You know, look at Tristan's face right now. It seemed like he'd been ignoring us this whole time, working on his kaj mahal. But once he hears this, I know this is going to be his next challenge.

That is little miles you are. But you know, I do think that now we've talked about just how much abuse Lego bricks can handle, it, it feels only fair to mention the kind of punishment they can dole out, especially when they're you know, strown across the floor of a darkened bedroom, as we both know this experience of parents of of of younger children. Yeah, I mean, it definitely sounds like you've got a story there, and I want to hear it. But before we do that, let's

take a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about Lego now, Mango. If playing with Lego bricks is a rite of passage for kids, then stepping on Lego bricks is probably the equivalent for parents, wouldn't you think, Yeah, definitely. I mean, forget first steps, forget first words. I feel like the real parental milestone is the first time you use the bathroom in the middle of the night and you wind up with little

plastic cube just lodged into your barefoot. Yeah, and then your kids get to hear some of those first words with your first steps on those Lego toys. I mean, it's it's a special kind of pain. I feel like it's just so much worse than these other minor injuries like stubbing your toe or something like that. And actually, it turns out there's actually a scientific explanation for why stepping on Lego pieces tends to hurt so badly. Now,

part of it comes down to our own biology. I mean, we have tons of nerve endings and the soles of our feet to help keep us balanced, and this makes the bottom of our feet so incredibly sensitive. But lego pieces are especially aggravating for a couple of reasons. So the first is, you know, they obviously have these sharp corners and race studs, which are painful enough in themselves. But the second one, and this goes back to what we were talking about before about their strength and their

ability to withstand nine fifty pounds of pressure. So when you step on one of these lego pieces, you simply don't weigh enough to compress it, so it's out of the force of your step being absorbed by the piece, it actually transmits that force right back into the soles of your feet, and all those delicate nerve endings that are there really feel that pain intense. So I guess all that durability is kind of a double edged sword, right, Yeah, And it's a pretty well known one at that because

I had not known about this previously. But in two thousand fifteen, the company even released their own branded slippers with extra padding to help deal with the problem, which seems a little bit absurved. I'm not sure why you could just get some other slippers, and you know, only about fifteen hundred pairs were produced. I guess we'll have to have to make our own. Yeah, But now that we've given the brickets, do I do want to shift gears and talk about the other Lego milestone for this year,

which is the birth of the Lego Mini figure. And we are so used to seeing these little yellow guys at the company's marketing and in just about all the sets they produced that it's tough to imagine the brand without them. But in reality, the mini figures we know didn't exist until so for twenty years, I mean, the company had been building these you know, houses and cars and all of this stuff, but no characters to put inside them. It feels like a pretty long running oversight,

don't you think. Yeah. So, the company had tried making Lego people once before in the early seventies, and this is when they rolled out a line of homemaker sets and it let the kids build rooms and furnishings for their own Lego houses. But these proto mini figures, they were designed to be built with existing Lego pieces, which meant they lacked like proper arms, feet, and as a result, they just looked like pretty abstract I guess, and they

certainly weren't that fun to play with. Okay, well that makes sense, So so how did the change come about? It was actually the idea of this designer who pretty much took on the task singlehandedly. He went through more than I think fifty different versions until he finally landed on what he considered to be the perfect blend of

blocky aesthetics and human like interactions. So, for example, his figures had movable arms and legs, as well as the hands to grip these other lego accessories, but they also had holes in their eat so they could be attached to a brick. And The first of these newly designed mini figures to hit the market was a police Officer. It was released in nineteen seventy eight. But this is

the strange part. Despite the redesign and the fact that the figure came packaged with a buildable police car, there was still no way to actually put the figure inside the car. But thankfully, over the next few years the company refined the concept. They eventually got the hang of how to scale the figures and vehicles so that they all worked together. It seems like a smart move. And actually this is also kind of random, but I read that since nineteen seventy eight, more than four billion Lego

Mini figures have been produced. That's pretty wild. So if you if you wrangled all those many figures together, gave them their own nation, they would actually constitute the largest population in the whole world Mango, I mean, if they were humans. Let's let's not get hung up on technicalities. It's a big number, but are you know the one thing I always wondered about these Lego Mini figures is why they're yellow? Mass has always been the rule, and is there a reason why they went with yellow in

the first place. Yellow is the default for Lego people even before the mini figure design was finalized, and according to the company, there's a good reason for that. So the designers wanted the figures to appeal to as many children as possible, and they didn't want the kid's imaginations

to be limited by perceptions of the figures race. So early on, the team decided that yellow was the most racially neutral color to use for a skin tone, and that's what they had stuck with ever since, which is, you know, until the companies started getting into the licensing game.

This was in the early two thousands, and once characters from franchises like Star Wars or Harry Potter's started getting the mini figure treatment, the company kind of relaxed their stance and they started using the real world skin tones to better match the source material. Yeah, and I feel like I remember this being somewhat controversial when they decided to make this shift. But I mean, unless they're based on real people, all the mini figures are still yellow,

So I'm not I'm not sure what the big deal is. Well, I think a lot of the people just objected to seeing Lego partnering with these outside brands, like they were purists. They worried that the company was losing sight of what made it so special in the first And if you think about it, like the company's specialty had always been these blank canvas products that kids could use to dream

up whatever stories they wanted. But once these floodgates were open to things like Star Wars or SpongeBob or Batman, like, suddenly Lego sets came with these stories and characters that were already pre baked into the properties. Okay, well, so it was kind of seen as a loss of innocence type thing for the company, I guess. But now that's

been a decade or so since that licensing began. What would you say is the consensus now because the moves still seen as the company selling its soul, or has it turned out to be not that big of a deal or what? Yeah, it depends on. On the one hand, that kind of license sets that we've been talking about have made Lego really successful. In two thousands seventeen, the company report the highest earnings in its eighty six year history,

and it's currently valued at nearly eight billion dollars. But then you've got other people who say that success is kind of cost the company a lot of its credibility. Lego products are often held up as these wonderful educational tools and and these great examples of stem or steam toys, and there's no doubt that they are in a lot of cases. But as licensed properties become more and more of the company's output, you have to wonder how much

longer that public goodwill is going to last. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like it's a pretty tricky balancing act at this stage in the company's history, and it'll be interesting to see how all of this evolves. But there is no denying that over the years, Lego toys have proven a fantastic way for educators and their students to

get involved in everything from math to engineering. And you know, I know we were talking about this before the show here, but there's a specialty line called Lego mind Storms, and it's basically a way to combine Lego bricks with sensors and motors and micro processors and all sorts of cool stuff like that, so that you know, kids can build everything from like a simple conveyor bell to you know, seeing photos of a walking robot, tricerah tops and they

can do this even if they don't know anything about computer programming. Yeah, mind Storms are pretty awesome. It was developed in partnership with m I T Media Lab. And this isn't the late eighties. It's really taken off since launching in the early nineties. Like there's this whole online community of makers now, and and schools even have these tournaments where students compete to design and build and program their own Lego robots. And it really isn't niche either.

I I read this article in Smithsonian that said, uh, half of all middle schools in America and about a quarter of elementary schools and high schools have worked with mind storms and kind of put them into the curriculum in one way or another. And I feel like that's a pretty amazing achievement for a toy line. Oh definitely. And those kinds of school programs are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impact

Lego products have had on the world of academics. And you know, even see plenty of adults and steam fields that have found some really interesting ways to use Lego bricks, and I want to make sure that we highlight at least a few of those before we call it a day. What do you say, Well, I'm definitely for that, But let's take another break. First, welcome back to Part Time Genius where we're talking Lego. So will I know you want to showcase some of the more inspired ways to

use Lego products, and I think I have the perfect example. So, first of all, have you ever heard of the superhero Cyborg camp? I have not, but it sounds pretty awesome just with those words. Yeah. So it's this week long design education event that's organized by San Francisco nonprofit called kid Mob and they've been doing it every year since two thousand and twelve, so I guess now it's called the Superhero Boost Body Mod Workshop. And anyway, it still

sounds awesome. But ideas for kids who are dealing with different forms of upper limb loss to come to this camp and learn a bunch of new design skills and then they can put what they've learned to use and actually design and build a new arm with its own set of superpowers. Oh that does sound really cool. So are you're about to tell me that someone actually built

a prosthetic arm out of Lego bricks? So not exactly, but people have paired Lego X with these servo motors to create press like arms as well as legs, and it's super impressive to see them in action. But in this case, this nine year old named Aiden Robinson made a different kind of Lego hand. So while attending the Superhero Camp in two thousand thirteen, Aiden used old toys and spare parts from a hardware store to fashion a

threaded metal rod into which you could attach different parts. So, for example, one attachment had a we remote built into it and another one had to built in fork. But the coolest one by far was this life sized version of the yellow claw like hands you could find on a Lego mini figure. I don't know how practical that is exactly, but it would definitely be a fun way

for holding burritos and corrects, I guess, just burritos. I mean, I do like the idea of having all these different attachments that you can swap around, including the a few that would just be for fun, like that yellow claw hand, but I mean, honestly, like, why not do that exactly? And one of the best parts is that one of the artists at the camp was so impressed with Aiden's creation that he actually helped him refine the concept and

build a working version later that year. And not only that, the two of them also brain storing these other specialty arms, Like there was one with this bow attachment so Aiden could actually play the violin in his school orchestra, and they built one with a super socer arm, which is just so awesome. I mean, you really want me over once you've said this about the super soaker, I could

have definitely used one of those this past summer. But all right, Well, here's another example of how Lego pieces have been making people's lives easier. Back in two thousand fifteen, the Natural History Museum in London took up a really unique and honestly daunting challenge that over the course of the next five years, they wanted to digitize their entire

collection of more than twenty million pins specimens. Now, to do this, they would need to take pictures of every kind of insect imaginable, and of course they wanted to be able to capture the fine details of each of these things, like leg hairs and wing tips, and so the photos would need to be taken from all different angles. This is easier said than done because some of these specimens are over three hundred years old and incredibly fragile.

Anytime you're picking up one of these things, you're definitely running the risk of breaking off an antenna or a leg or some other truly fragile part of these So I am curious how lego figures into this, because I mean, it does seem like entomologists have been handling pinned insects for centuries and photographing them, So don't they have their

own like specialty tools that exist already, Like why use legos? Well, that's the thing I mean those kinds of devices do exist, but most of them are pretty unwieldy and and actually really expensive too, And that's why one of the museum's entomologists, this Danish guy named Steen DuPont, he started looking for an alternative solution. I was looking at this article in The Atlantic about this, and as they described it, DuPont wanted something quote cheap, portable, and customizable so that he

could observe the wings of his moths easier. And since he'd been born and raised in Denmark, he naturally thought that his favorite childhood toy might be the right tool for the job, and he was right. So I used a bunch of those black and gray building blocks and a handful of connector pieces, and in doing this he was able to fashion, you know, several of these insect manipulators that can easily position and even rotate these pen specimens.

And so the devices range in size from like thirty pieces, some of them have more than a hundred and fifty pieces. But even the biggest of these designs only takes about ten minutes to build, and all of them cost less than twenty bucks, which you know, is a lot less expensive than most of the scientific equipment people would have

been using. But the best part is that Dupump put all the designs and building instructions up online for free, so professional and amateur entomologists across the globe can now piece together their very own insect manipulators. I mean, the crazy thing is it's not even the first time I've heard of museum workers using lego bricks to jerry rake these solutions. Like, uh, there was this other museum in

England that had this three thousand year old sarcophagus. But the as the air is so damp and chili there, the relics face and the chest eventually caved in on itself and the museum just stuck the whole thing in the basement for decades. So why couldn't they just repair it them? Museums restore artifacts all the time, right, Yeah, But because the sarcophagus was made from this paper mache like material, repairing it would involve wetting the case so

they could be reshaped. But there's a strong chance the relic would have gotten even more damage in that process. But thankfully this Cambridge grad the student named David Knowles, came up with this pretty clever workaround. He built these six adjustable Lego platforms, or mummy jacks as he called them, and they basically propped up the collapsing parts of the sarcophagus and this liminated that concern, you know, over these further cave ins, and it allowed the team to get

in there. They moistened and reshaped the Mommy back into this original shafe and it was really simple and low tech and perfect for what was this really complex problem. I mean, I feel like that kind of sums up Lego toys pretty perfectly, don't you think. I mean, you've got the toy that's deceptively simple on the surface, just a bunch of plastic blocks that snapped together, and they're

not super detail. There's no elaborate backstory or eye catching gimmick to this, and it with just a handful of these bricks, you can create literally anything you can think of. Yeah, and you're absolutely right that a handful of bricks is really all it takes. And in fact, there's this mathematician named sar And Eilers, and he helped Lego group determine exactly how many possible structures you could make from just

six standard Lego bricks. Wow, and what kind of piece was he using for this, Uh, he was using a four by tube brick, which you know is rectangular. And after writing this computer program that modeled every possible combination of six of these bricks, Tilers ended up with a truly massive number because it turns out that with just six of these bricks you can make over nine million

different combinations. Oh wow. I mean, maybe that's not an endless area possibilities, but that's pretty That's a big number. And I would have to imagine though, like as you continued adding bricks, that number of combinations would just spiral out of control pretty quickly. Yeah. I under said that if you wanted his program to calculate nine or ten bricks like it would probably take years and maybe even hundreds of years. Sometimes math just doesn't make any sense.

I don't notice that. It's just we're heard. Well, let's leave that challenge for the next generation of lego maniacs to take up, and I'm sure there won't be any shortage of them in the future. But in the meantime, what do you say we pieced together a few of the stray facts we couldn't fit in today's episode, and maybe see what kind of fact off, we can build

with him, sounds good to me. Well, you may have seen this story, but sometime last year in Fort Worth, Texas, there was an off duty police officer that was visiting a children's hospital there and he would go there pretty regularly. He would dress up as certain superheroes. On this day, he was dressed as Batman, and obviously there to try to put smiles on the kid's face, says, and it's just pretty neat that he does this. But after one of his visits, he was in a local walmart and

he noticed the man's shoplifting. It turns out one of the movies this guy was shoplifting was Lego Batman. He was a big fan of both Batman and Lego, and so he was probably a little thrown off when you know, this surreal experience happened of Batman coming up and threatening to arrest him, and he apologized, of course, but then asked to take a selfie with Batman. That is bold.

So I think we might have shared this at some point, but I still think it's funny that the world's largest tire manufacturer is not Michelin or Goodyear or Firestone, but Lego, who produces nearly four billion units. It's pretty unbelieve. I don't think any of those other competitors, I guess you could say, going to catch them anytime soon. My son William and I spent lots of time checking out the photos on NASA's Juno probe that they would send back

from its trips around Jupiter. But one of the I thought was fun was that there were a few Lego mini figures along for the ride. And that's because they were thinking back to its history of the exploration and and kind of observation of Jupiter, and looking back to the time when Galileo was the first to observe and report on Jupiter's four largest moons. This was way back

in sixteen ten. So the team who planned the mission felt it was appropriate to allow Galileo to finally make the trip to Jupiter as a Lego figure at least. And he was made of aluminum, you know, to protect him from the radiation from Jupiter. And he was joined by two other figures, the mini Juno Queen of the

Gods and the god Jupiter. I like that they sent this crew up there, like Galileo and who was killed of heresy, right, And so you remember from the Lego movie that there was lots to talk about master builders, and Wild Style of course was the coolest. But there are actually master builders who work at Lego. The company employees about fifty of him, and they call him Master model Builders, and they actually get paid to build with Legos.

So if you've ever been to a Lego Land location, these are the people who build all the incredible mini worlds and sculptures that you see all over the park. And I was reading an interview with one of the master builders and he explained that to get the job, obviously you've got to share your incredible portfolio of all the things you've already built, but they also have this test while you're there, and applicants get an hour to

build something that represents themselves. Wow, that's pretty cool. Well, given that Lego bricks are made of plastic and that they are literally billions of them in existence, I know many of us have wondered whether the company would eventually find a way to produce more sustainable pieces, and it turns out the company does have a goal to make all of its bricks from sustainable materials. This is not until twenty thirty that they hope to realize this goal

in full. And so they've invested in a sustainability center at their headquarters in Denmark and have hired dozens of employees to focus on this. And we're talking about chemical engineers and product designers and there to asked with trying to figure out how to make these incredibly durable pieces out of more sustainable material So it definitely won't be uneasy task. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Yeah,

it's pretty fascinating. So I like reading the answers that the company actually provides to fans who submit questions about the future plans for the company, And one of them that comes up fairly regularly is are there any plans to sell real life brick sized Lego pieces? Because I want to build an actual house, And the company replied, we have no plans at this time to sell real life brick sized lego pieces. You'll just have to build

your home from normal materials at the time being. But actually, in two thousand nine, men in Great Britain actually did

build the world's first full sized lego house. It took him three point three million bricks and it had a working toilet and a bed, and it was all mid a Lego, and there was talk for a while of Lego Land actually helping to move the house to the nearest theme park, but it proved too expensive, and so it's kind of sad, you know, it ended the way most Lego creative and ended with the whole thing getting demolished. Oh man, three point three million bricks worth of work

all demolished. That is pretty sad. All right, Well, did you know that Lego used to celebrate employees who had worked for twenty five years with the company by giving them a gold Lego brick. It was just a solid two by four gold Lego piece that was worth about fifteen thousand dollars at the time. Actually, that's really sweet. I like the But if you look over there, it looks like Tristan just put the final block on his taj Mahalan. He's got what is it like half the

office end ground and patting him on the back. It's pretty impressive. I'm actually a little bit worried he might have forgotten to hit record because he's been so distracted. But by the off chance that he did manage to record this episode, I feel like Tristan deserves the trophy today. Yeah, I'm good with that and listeners, we'd love to hear stories about Lego, the most incredible things you've built or seen build, or any other facts you want to share

with us. You can send those two part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot com, where always you can hit us up at Facebook or Twitter. But from Will gave, Tristan, Me and the rest of the gang at Farttime Genius. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Fartime Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does

the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the exact producer thing. Gave Bluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review for US. Do we do we forget Jason?

Jason who