chapter fourteen Of all the construction toys described in this book, Lego is probably the best known. There cannot be many middle-class parents over the last fifty years who do not know what it feels like to step with bare feet onto an unexpected Lego brick lying in wait on the carpet. Lego is a toy with a long history. The first Lego plastic bricks appeared in 1947, the current version in 1958, and in 2000 Lego was named ‘Toy of the Century’ by Fortune magazine in the US and by the Toy Retailers Association in Britain. 1 The origins of Lego are quite complicated. The basis of Lego, in the beginning, is the interlocking brick. There were interlocking bricks in the 1930s, such as Bild-O-Brik in the US in 19342 and the British Minibrix, which we have written about in Chapter 9. These bricks offered a limited range of shapes, and had studs on the bottom that interlocked with corresponding holes in the row of bricks below. Because they are rubber, the studs on the bricks deform slightly to lock the bricks securely together. Next on the scene were the wooden American Bricks, made by Halsam, the makers of the Lincoln Logs that appeared in Chapter 6 (Halsam also made the earlier, non-studded American Brick Blocks). 3 Halsam was founded in 1917 by two brothers-in-law, Harold Elliot and Sam Goss, Jr., who combined their names to form the company’s. One source says that Harold’s son, Kip, came back from England, where he had spent time as a child in the 1940s and discovered his 176 Lego and the Green City favourite toy, Minibrix; he helped launch American Bricks, which were made using the machinery that Halsam used to mass-produce checkers (draughts to the British) and dominoes. 4 However, another states that the first American Bricks patent was filed in 1939, 5 so the origin is clearly disputed. Perhaps Kip’s sojourn in England was in the 1930s, rather than during the Blitz, and then the whole thing would make sense, as the American Bricks patent is clearly later than that for Minibrix. The basic wooden American Brick has eight raised studs on the top, whereas the basic Minibrix brick has two studs on the bottom, but unlike their rubber predecessors, American Bricks interlock fairly loosely. This means they are fixed in relation to one another and cannot slide around, but they do not stay together if you pick them up. This makes them a halfway house between the plain blocks of Richter’s and Lott’s and the fully interlocking blocks of Minibrix and Lego. In some ways American Bricks were a ‘green’ product. Apparently Sam Goss used to let the workers go home early on days when the factory got too hot, 6 which would mark him as a green employer, or maybe they just didn’t have air conditioning; these days the lack of air conditioning might class the factory as a green building. And of course Sam’s bricks were made of wood, a natural renewable resource, just like Minibrix, which were made of natural rubber. However, the world was moving away from natural renewable resources towards plastics made from oil (and natural gas). 7 Halsam duly followed the trend, making plastic bricks called, with glorious logic, American Plastic Bricks, which were a close copy of American (wooden) Bricks8 . Both the wooden and plastic versions had cardboard windows and doors, 9 tastefully printed with curtains and blinds, 10 which fitted into slots in the bricks in the same manner as the celluloid windows of Minibrix. Later the windows changed to plastic ones that could be opened. The roofs are also like Minibrix roofs, but in cardboard rather than rubber, and American Plastic Bricks had lintels, like the Minibrix ones, for spanning openings. 11 When Messrs Elliot and Goss went into plastics moulding in a big way they formed a separate company called Elgo (from Elliot and Goss), 12 which seems to have taken over the manufacture of American Plastic Bricks, although the Elgo sets do not appear to have had lintels. 13 The Australian copy of American Plastic Bricks, called Bilda-Brix, did not have lintels either, but did have narrow metal strips to support the bricks over the openings. These were unconvincingly replaced by bits of cardboard in the New Zealand version of Bilda-Brix. 14 Our experience is that Bilda-Brix definitely do not interlock sufficiently to allow a Lego and the Green City 177
An early interlocking Lego-style toy: 1950s American Bricks, made of wood by Halsam in the US. An Australian interlocking plastic brick toy of the 1960s: the Bilda-Brix Three-Storey House and the Factory from Set No. 2.
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