LEGO celebrates 60 years with a half-ton brick in New York City [News]

To celebrate the 60th birthday of its iconic 2×4 brick, LEGO created a red 10-foot tall brick and placed it in New York City right in front of the Flatiron Building. The larger-than-life brick weighs in at 1,200 pounds, is made up of more than 133,000 individual bricks, and took 350 hours to make.

Even more mind-blowing than seeing such a plastic monolith in a concrete jungle is that a LEGO brick from 1958 still interlocks with a LEGO brick made today. This is due to precision injection molding and the original idea of using tubes to create clutch power. Before the Kristiansens settled on the familiar tube underside, they considered several 0ptions for the original pattern of LEGO bricks.

The LEGO brick has certainly come a long way in 60 years. The molds used to produce LEGO elements today are accurate to within 0.004mm – less than the width of a single hair. Such precision enables the construction of massive builds like the one in New York, drafted and rendered initially on a computer.

Still have doubts about how amazing the LEGO brick is? Here are some facts and figures to sway your opinion:

  • You can combine six 2×4 LEGO bricks in a mind-numbing 915,103,765 ways.
  • A stack of about 40 billion LEGO bricks would reach the moon.
  • LEGO bricks are now available in more than 60 different colors.
  • Besides the original 2×4 brick, there are more than 3,700 different types of LEGO elements now in production.

So to celebrate the LEGO brick’s 60th birthday, go ahead and build something amazing of your own (maybe with one of the anniversary sets now available), or take a walk down memory lane by grabbing the four classic mini-builds gift-with-purchase set from the Lego Store. However you celebrate the day, let your imagination run wild and play well!

2 comments on “LEGO celebrates 60 years with a half-ton brick in New York City [News]”

  2. Purple Dave

    From what I’ve heard, that set of alternate interior designs to the 2×4 brick was done partly to determine which was the best option to go forward with, and partly to establish patents on all the rest of the potential designs that they could come up with before anyone else could. Of the unproduced variants, the X-bottom did actually see some use eventually, in the original design for the 2×2 tile. It was notable in that you could achieve 1/2-stud offsets by fitting studs between adjacent arms of the “X”.

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