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One of the most famous children’s toy companies in the world is LEGO. Founded nearly a century ago in Denmark, the company has grown into one of the most creative construction and design companies inspiring children to think with engineering and creativity.
Here in Bowling Green, a life-size Western Kentucky University mascot was built out of LEGOs a few years ago,
and it remains on display at the Kentucky Museum.
The LEGO company’s story begins in 1932 when Ole Kirk Christiansen founded the company in
his carpenter shop. His company had been building houses and small furniture since 1916, but
the Great Depression forced him to change business models. His company started making
miniature models of furniture as design aids when the economy broke down, and the creation of
these models is what inspired the wooden toy development of piggy banks, pull cars, and trucks
by 1932.
The company name “LEGO” is a contraction of two Danish words, “play” and “well.”
Christiansen held the company naming contest in-house and his own employees formed it.
When plastic became more readily available in Europe after World War II, the LEGO company
introduced plastic toy molds for building bricks. The idea to create a toy building system with
multiple opportunities for the building based on a few key pieces grew stronger by the 1950s.
The LEGO company hired Samsonite to produce and expand sales to North America in the
1960s. Selling Legos to Americans gave the company a boost, and it was able to target young
girls with the introduction of dollhouse kits by the 1970s. LEGO had gone global by the 1980s,
and the first LEGO World Cup was held in Denmark in 1988, featuring competitors from 17
countries.
In 2018, Western Kentucky University Civil Engineering professor Jason Wilson enlisted the
help of students Austin Loney and Taylor Collins to build a life-size Big Red. The students
scanned a 3-D Big Red and converted it into a PDF that was sent directly to LEGO company,
which sent back over 40 thousand LEGO bricks for its construction. The LEGO Big Red made
its debut in 2019 and is now the welcoming face on the first-floor window gallery of the Kentucky
Museum on campus. The Big Red took 500 hours to build and weighs 350 pounds.
That’s it this week, brought to you by Hart County Tourism and the Kentucky Museum. In
Bowling Green, because local matters, Telia Butler, WNKY News 40.
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