Business Week is impressed by Lego bricks.
The bricks are so versatile that just six of them can be arranged in 915,103,765 ways. No wonder Lego has been named “Toy of the Century” – twice… The company claims that out of every 1 million elements made, just 18 will be declared defective and removed from the set. Impressive numbers, considering that the Lego Group is producing 15 billion components a year – that’s 1.7 million items an hour, or 28,500 a minute. Tyre production accounts for some of that number; the factory also produces 306 million tiny rubber tyres a year. In fact, going by that number, Lego is the world’s No. 1 tyre manufacturer.
Related: Art of the Brick, how Lego bricks are made, the politics of Lego, and the Lego harpsichord, which sounds much like you’d imagine.
(h/t, Coudal.)
“New toys (mainly Lego) have led to the extinction of Meccano and this has been a major disaster as far as the education of our young engineers and scientists is concerned. Lego is a technically trivial plaything and kids love it partly because it is so simple and partly because it is seductively coloured. However it is only a toy, whereas Meccano is a real engineering kit […]”
— Sir Harold Kroto – Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1996