Original subtitles

- Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

who would like to see something magical?

Mmm?

- A.C. Gilbert was that guy who could just do everything.

The man went to Yale, studied medicine.

He also picked up a gold medal at the 1908 Olympics.

- Now let’s see if we can make this scarf disappear.

(crowd applauding)

- While he’s at Yale to help him put himself through school,

he’s doing magic shows.

- A.C. Gilbert quickly realized that there was

a massive profit to be made in selling beginner magic kits.

- Every Mysto Magic Kit comes

with a complete set of instructions.

So, who would like to make some magic?

- Like so many of the great inventors and visionaries

throughout American history, Gilbert is an overachiever.

Something in him was restless.

Something in him wanted to tackle

this next great obstacle and maybe test himself.

- Great work, A.C.

Hoo! - Yeah.

I didn’t sell that many.

Magic is too small.

We need something bigger.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In an age when steel

is building America bigger,

and skyscrapers are rising up to unimaginable new heights,

A.C. Gilbert is inspired to create a new kind of toy.

- The Erector set becomes a way of helping build the world.

- [Narrator] It will be America’s top seller

for almost half a century.

- A.C. Gilbert was a ruthless pursuer of profits.

He wanted it all.

- [Narrator] Taking on the world’s biggest toy mogul.

- They’re selling our damn product.

- [Bruce] There’s nothing Gilbert loved more

than head-to-head competition.

- [Narrator] Inspiring a new generation to think big.

- The Erector set was the toy that people

who built America played with.

You really cannot underestimate how valuable that was.

- [Narrator] Creating a class of toys that today

generates over $9 billion a year,

and paving the way for a new competitor

to innovate the most lucrative toy brand

the world has ever known.

(rising dramatic music)

(metal clanging)

(train chugging) (horn blaring)

- [Conductor] Ticket, sir?

- Imagine being smart enough to be a Yale-trained physician,

athletic enough to win a gold medal in the pole vault,

and charismatic enough to be a professional magician,

and that was A.C. Gilbert.

- Gilbert had a partner who got things started

with him in the magic business.

- John Petrie was making the sets,

Gilbert was promoting them.

They created the Mysto Manufacturing Company.

- [Tim] At this time, toys were really localized,

and a lot of inventors would have their own shop

and sell their own wares.

- A.C. is traveling to New York a lot.

He opened a store down there, so he would go down there,

they would do shows.

(train horn blaring)

- Gilbert was going into New York one day in 1911.

He looked out the window and he saw these girders going up.

- As they were electrifying the train,

they had all these steel girders to support the lines,

the wires before they could hung them

and permanently install them.

- He just got really fascinated by how the structure looked

and how it fit together.

Kind of got him thinking.

(adventurous dramatic music)

- In the 19th century, people were not used to seeing big,

massive buildings.

Steel allows the Flat Iron building to be 22 stories tall.

That was a huge shift.

This is mind-blowing. This is boggling.

It feels magical to the typical American

to see buildings that could go so high.

- You’re seeing huge new skyscrapers going up

all over the place.

Chicago, New York.

All these massive new steel frame structures,

cranes like nobody had ever seen before.

- Gilbert sees these massive steel beams

reaching into the sky, and as he’s looking at this,

this jarring different image from anything

he would’ve seen as a child,

a light goes on in his head.

- He begins to think what if I could build

something like that?

What would it be like for a boy to be able

to use these girders in a little toy set?

Just a simple model of girders and beams

that would fit together in any way you chose.

(upbeat percussive music)

That very night, he came back home

and he got out a bunch of old shirt card boards

and cut these girders about an inch wide.

- For A.C. Gilbert, it just did not have to look

like the real thing, it had to be strong enough

to mimic the real thing.

- But as he begins making these girders,

he realizes that when they get to a certain length,

they’re going to have flex, they’re going to bow.

- Steel has a tensile strength that allows it

to go very high, and you can use what we all

recognize now as steel girders.

The right angle created by the girder

provides the support.

- [Adam] So he realizes he needs to create, essentially,

mini girders that have that right angle flange.

(pensive msuic)

- His genius was to actually crimp the edges

so that they had real structural strength.

- [Narrator] Gilbert wants to make his building toy

out of real steel, but it’s never been done before.

- The toy industry in the 19-teens

tended to be not very impressive toys.

They were tin soldiers, a lot of wooden toys.

Construction toys existed, but very rudimentary, right?

You think of wooden blocks held together

by gravity and that’s it.

- Gilbert took the girders down to a tool and die factory

in New Haven and had them made into solid steel.

- It was revolutionary because it was made of a real steel.

The girders were real and could actually

support real weight.

- You can put pieces of them together to create a bridge,

to create a building.

You can pretty much create anything.

- A.C. Gilbert realizes he’s going to need

a much bigger shop and spend money on a lot of materials.

- This is where the fracture begins between

Petrie and Gilbert.

- When he approaches Petrie with this idea of expansion,

a focus on construction, Petrie bucks.

He wants to actually stay in the magic realm.

- Gilbert saw his magic sets

as a limited market.

- It was a nice little start,

but that’s not what his big dream was.

This is a guy who was ambitious,

who liked to do things and do them right and do them big.

(upbeat hip hop music)

- [Narrator] Without the support of his partner,

Gilbert takes his building set

to the 1913 Toy Fair in New York.

He calls it the Erector Structural Steel

and Electro Mechanical Builder.

It will go on to become the Erector set.

- But when he’s at the toy fair,

he does what he always did as a magician.

He performed.

- Gilbert spread his Erector set models around,

and he leapt around the room demonstrating them to people.

- [Narrator] Gilbert’s Erector set allows kids

to build giant models up to eight feet high,

and construct bridges that are 21 feet long.

- It also had a motor,

the first motor in any toy in America,

and that meant if you built a a cantilever bridge,

you could make it rise.

If you built a seesaw, you could make it go up and down.

- Kids, they could see how they could build these things.

They could almost understand how a skyscraper is built

because they’ve done it in miniature.

And I think a lot of toy distributors realized

the brilliance of this.

- Buyers were very enthusiastic. He knew he had a hit.

(tense music)

- When you have two partners and you can’t agree

on something and it’s a 50/50 deal, sometimes it gets ugly.

- Gilbert borrows money so that he could move forward,

create the Erector set on his own terms.

(suspenseful music)

- You’re buying me out?

- Magic is your passion.

- Gilbert got Petrie to sign a contract he didn’t read

that waived all rights, all possible royalties.

- A.C. Gilbert was a ruthless pursuer of profits.

He wanted it all, and he got it.

- So John Petrie sort of disappears into smoke

at this point with some bitterness,

and perhaps deserved.

- It was the only way for Gilbert to move forward

and start to build his dream of this empire.

- He is willing to make this his life mission,

and he is essentially putting his whole career

and his company on the line.

(rising dramatic music)

- [Narrator] And on the other side of the world,

after nearly going bankrupt,

a struggling Danish carpenter is about to risk

everything he has

(tense dramatic music)

on a new technology

that will revolutionize the building toy industry

forever.

- [Narrator] A.C. Gilbert is now in sole control,

and plunges himself further into debt,

investing in a factory

and hiring workers to manufacture

his new construction toy.

Within months, the Erector set debuts.

- Almost immediately from the introduction

of the Erector set in 1913, it became popular.

- Families are snatching it up.

Children are enjoying building with it.

The reaction is huge.

- These are not toys.

These are engineering kits.

These are boyhood in a box.

- [Narrator] In his first year,

A.C. Gilbert pulls in over $140,000,

$4 million today.

Now freed from debt, he starts thinking bigger.

- He had visions well beyond Connecticut

and even the New York area.

I think he was influenced by Vanderbilt and Carnegie,

the sort of the entrepreneurs of his time.

- While the robber barons were really creating

a national market for big industrial products

such as oil and steel,

when it comes to smaller products such as toys,

this is still mostly a regional phenomenon.

- You had your regional toy shop

or the one in your town who was crafting toys

for a local audience.

- But Gilbert isn’t satisfied with being

just another regionally successful toy.

He wants to have a nationally successful toy.

- He’s looking at the nation and saying,

what if I can put an Erector set under the Christmas tree

of every young boy in America?

- Getting a toy to be a national bestseller

was a daunting challenge.

(tense dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In 1913, American advertising

is in its infancy.

Car, soap, food and tobacco companies

are just starting to market nationally,

but no one has ever advertised a toy nationwide.

- Gilbert, he wants to reach a national audience

and to connect with both the children and the parents.

- It’s not good enough just to have a good product.

You have got to bring it to people’s attention.

- [Narrator] Gilbert needs a hook for his ad campaign,

and he finds it in the country’s latest dilemma.

- 1900 to 1915 or so,

there was what some people called the boy problem.

There was a lot of juvenile delinquency,

and there was a lot of crime among boys.

- The idea of childhood is new.

Kids worked on farms for the vast majority of human history,

and so this idea that kids are going to have this period

of time where they are generally protected

is just being introduced.

- And as child labor laws restrict

the ability of employers to hire children,

the question essentially becomes

what do young people do for leisure?

(tense dramatic music)

- Gilbert began to see the marketing potential

of an Erector set as some way to channel the boyhood energy,

and he saw that you could tell mothers mostly,

but also fathers, this is what your boy needs.

- A.C. Gilbert proceeds to organize

the first national ad campaign for a toy.

- He buys full-page ads in "Cosmopolitan,"

"Saturday Evening Post," "Popular Mechanics."

He aimed high.

- [Narrator] Gilbert spends the modern equivalent

of $2 million on his unprecedented ad campaign.

- Gilbert’s ads were revolutionary at the time.

He approached kids directly.

- Hey boys, do you wanna build your own steam shovel?

Do you wanna build your own bridge?

Get an Erector set made by the A.C. Gilbert Company.

- A.C. Gilbert makes himself a character

in his own business.

He uses his own character as kind of an archetype,

a bold, new, legendary figure.

He was an Olympic athlete, this guy,

so he’s putting himself in his ads.

- He put ads in "Good Housekeeping."

Boys didn’t read "Good Housekeeping," but mothers did.

And he would say, solves the boy problem.

- [Narrator] Gilbert’s $2 million ad investment

turns into profits of nearly 150 million in today’s dollars.

- This changes the game for marketing toys in general,

like suddenly people are making a lot of money

doing this thing that used to be kind of local.

- [Narrator] But Gilbert’s newfound success

soon attracts unwanted attention.

- In England, a man named Frank Hornby had created

a product called Meccano.

- The thing is, Meccano sets were construction toys,

and it was massive throughout Europe.

- [Bruce] It’s a little different.

It was a construction set.

It did have girders and nuts and bolts.

- And it’s great for building cars or trucks.

Erector, on the other hand,

is really designed to build mini versions of big things.

Buildings, bridges.

(tense dramatic music)

- Erector sets made their debut in the United States

in 1913, but Meccano was a whole decade before that.

Hornby wanted the US market and he had to suspect

that Gilbert somehow saw what he was making

and made the same thing.

- To what degree did A.C. Gilbert

borrow from Frank Hornby?

It’s up for debate. We don’t know.

We do know that he was in London in 1908.

We do know at that time he was thinking

about getting into toys and manufacturing.

Is it possible that A.C. Gilbert walked into a toy store

in London in 1908 and saw a Meccano, Mechanics Made Easy?

- [Bruce] The origin story of Erector set,

like many origin stories, is in dispute.

It’s part myth, part fact.

- He’s a magician.

His whole thing is sleight of hand.

His whole thing is manufacturing myth.

So anything could be true.

(tense dramatic music)

- When Hornby discovers this, essentially, knockoff

of his product, how do you think he would feel?

(tense dramatic music)

- They’re selling our damn product.

- This was not something that he was just going

to take lying down.

- [Narrator] And for A.C. Gilbert,

(pensive music)

more challengers are coming.

- [Godtfred] What are they?

- [Ole] Building bricks.

- [Narrator] When Godtfred Christiansen

brings his colorful plastic bricks to the United States-

- [News Anchor] The sensation of Europe now made in America.

- [Narrator] He’ll turn a disastrous partnership

into the most successful toy brand the world has ever known.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] For British toy maker Frank Hornby,

the similarities between his building sets

and A.C. Gilbert’s are unmistakable.

- There are some people who feel that Gilbert

may have ripped off Meccano.

- The degree to which it’s theft.

I don’t think A.C. Gilbert would’ve seen it that way

because once you figure out a magic trick,

how can you steal it?

It’s just something you can do.

- [Narrator] But regardless of its origins,

Erector and A.C. Gilbert are now both

household names in the U.S.

- He is probably the largest toy manufacturer in America.

- The richest and most successful business

in America were Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan.

Gilbert stepped right into that mold.

- [Narrator] And now Hornby wants to battle Gilbert

for control of the biggest market in the world.

(tense music)

- [Bruce] In 1922, Meccano came over and set up a factory

in Elizabeth, New Jersey, within a few hours of New Haven.

- [Christopher] Hornby was coming to Gilbert’s own backyard

and duking it out for dominance in the marketplace.

- [Narrator] Hornby also starts adopting

some of Erector set’s features,

like adding a motor and upping the ante

with an electric train.

But Gilbert fires back.

- There’s nothing Gilbert loved from boyhood on

more than head-to-head competition.

And in the 1920s you see Erector explode.

Gilbert’s zeppelin was five feet long,

and then he had another model that built

a four-foot long steam locomotive.

- [Narrator] But Gilbert doesn’t stop there.

- This was an era where the A.C. Gilbert Company

like, starts to diversify beyond Erector sets.

He starts creating microscopes and chemistry sets,

and he buys American Flyer,

and he uses it to create this empire.

(tense dramatic music)

- Ultimately, the results were not a success for Hornby.

- [Andrew] He just couldn’t really compete.

- Gilbert purchased the American manufacturing operations

of Meccano, including the Elizabeth factory.

Eventually the brand became known as Gilbert Meccano.

- [Narrator] By the early 1930s,

A.C. Gilbert has the building sets market all to himself.

- He’s able to expand his business in such a way

that he’s not just the largest toy maker

in the United States.

He’s the largest toy maker in the world.

- [Narrator] Erector will reign as the best-selling toy

in America for another four decades.

- You’ve gotta give him credit.

For 40 years there, he kept the Erector set

as the number one toy in America.

- [Narrator] But 3,600 miles away,

a new contender for the building set throne

is about to rise up.

(knocking on door)

- In a tiny backwater town in Denmark,

there was a carpenter named Ole Christiansen.

- Ole is in the heart of the Great Depression,

and then his wife gets very sick and she dies suddenly,

and he’s got four children,

the ages of 6 to 15, that he’s raising.

- [Narrator] At the same time,

his carpentry business is on the verge of bankruptcy.

- They say necessity is the mother of invention,

and this led Christiansen to start looking

at the scrap wood around his workshop with a different view.

- He goes into his carpentry shop one day

and he starts to make some toys.

- Christiansen needed to feed his family.

He goes door to door selling his toys.

- Ole starts to realize that there’s real traction

with his wooden toys and he says, well,

I probably should create a name for my toys

because the Billund Carpentry Shop is not a great name

for a toy company.

- [Expert] In Danish, leg means play, godt means well.

- So Ole took the L and the E and the G and the O

and he created a new word and he called it Lego.

- [Narrator] Today the Lego name generates

nearly $8 billion a year,

with 75 billion bricks sold annually in over 140 countries.

36,000 Legos (tense dramatic music)

are created every minute.

(tense dramatic music)

But before Ole invents the brick

that will take over the world,

(rising dramatic music)

he’ll have to face disaster. (flames crackling)

(soft dramatic music)

- It’s 1942 and Ole has a very successful company

in Denmark, and he’s got employees,

he’s got his sons working for him,

and an electrical fire

sets the wooden carpentry shop on fire

(flames crackling)

and the entire place goes down in ashes.

- Here’s a guy who’s essentially back to ground zero,

and he doesn’t let that stop him.

- He was all about, I’m not gonna give up,

and that was a big theme with Ole.

He always persevered even through the hardest times.

He borrows money from family, from friends, from banks,

and he rebuilds the Lego factory.

- His son Godtfred had joined the company at age 14.

He was brought on to brainstorm ideas for toys.

- Godtfred is having more of an important role.

He’s in his twenties now,

so he’s doing more and more in the company.

He’s designing new toys, trying to grow.

Everything they’ve done so far is building wooden toys.

Ole is really starting to hone in on the toy industry.

What are the trends and what are the technologies out there?

Because Ole was always about innovating.

- [Godtfred] Hey. (patting on back)

- I have something to show you.

- Ole gets a few samples of a toy that’s being made

by a different company, and it’s called Kiddicraft.

- An English inventor named Hilary Page

had invented it about a decade earlier and patented it.

What he hadn’t done was he hadn’t patented it in Denmark.

(soft dramatic music)

- [Godtfred] What are they?

- [Ole] Building bricks.

- There was a Lego before the Lego.

All great ideas come from somewhere.

- Look how perfect they are.

Even color throughout.

And our new machine will make thousands.

(tense dramatic music)

- What do you mean our new machine?

- In 1946,

Ole travels

to a toy fair in Copenhagen, Denmark,

and it is there that he sees an injection molding machine,

which can make toys out of plastic,

and he buys it.

And it’s a little bit of an impulsive purchase.

It’s cost 30,000 kroner,

which is how much profit Lego had made

the last two years combined.

- And dad bets the farm on this new endeavor,

and you’re essentially brought along for the ride.

That’s gotta be a disconcerting moment.

- Come on. - (sighs) Dad.

- So in World War II,

the United States government needs a product

they can produce quickly.

They need something that can help with the grips on guns.

They need something that is easier to shape than steel,

that’s very durable,

and so they come upon the use of plastic.

This changes consumer culture.

There was no Tupperware before World War II.

- Most toys of that era were made of wood

or paper or cardboard.

You have to give the Lego company credit for shifting

when plastic came.

- What Ole recognized was a wave of the future.

(gentle piano music)

Plastic had consistent color all the way through

that will always look bright and fresh.

- You can make something very precise

out of a very cheap material.

- Godtfred starts to think that maybe his father

is onto something.

(bright adventurous music)

- [Narrator] Ole and Godtfred experiment with size, thickness,

and shape until they land on the perfect model.

- They’re called automatic binding bricks.

It’s actually very different than the Lego bricks

we know today.

- The early Legos, if you looked at the top,

it looks like a Lego, right?

But when you turn it over, it was hollow.

- [Narrator] By the early 1950s,

the Lego brick is off to a slow start.

- They can’t understand why this hasn’t caught on,

and they know they have to change something,

but they don’t know what yet.

(dramatic hip hop music)

- So in 1954, Godtfred Christiansen

goes to a toy exhibition

in Britain, and he meets a purchasing manager

who is bemoaning the fact that in the toy industry

there is no system whatsoever,

and the word system lights a candle

in Godtfred Christiansen.

- And this is his big a-ha moment.

What they first produce is called the Town-Plan.

- With the Town-Plan,

Lego starts transitioning into the company we know of today.

Now, rather than just giving a box of bricks,

there was a plan.

- Okay, I’m gonna build a church, I’m gonna build a store,

I’m gonna build a school.

- You could build a certain structure,

but as every parent knows, once you buy two kits,

the blocks all get mixed together,

and really it’s like, well, now I can build whatever I like.

- [Narrator] The Christiansens see an increase in sales.

For the first time, Lego expands its reach

into foreign markets,

starting with the Nordic countries.

But there’s still a problem.

(tense music)

- Godtfred starts to hear the same feedback over and over,

that the Lego bricks are very fun and the Town-Plan is fun,

but they don’t stick together.

- Although they fit on top of one another,

they didn’t actually grip so that they stuck there.

- And they start getting returns.

And more returns.

Toy stores can’t sell ’em.

Godtfred knows he has to get this right.

If these bricks don’t fit together perfectly,

then this could be a fad.

They knew they were almost there,

and they couldn’t give up.

(gentle music)

- Godtfred now has a problem.

While the Lego bricks sold quite well at first,

the bricks don’t stick together,

and if they don’t stick together

and the dog hits the table, there goes my tower.

- The original Legos were hollow,

which meant they didn’t possess

what the modern Lego blocks have, known as clutch power.

- He knows this brick probably better than anyone else.

He realizes that it’s really just a physics problem,

and if he can just figure out how to make them stick,

he could solve this problem.

(tense dramatic music) (pencil tapping)

(rising dramatic music)

- The real eureka moment comes with these

tubes at the bottom.

- He creates a design with a series of tubes on the inside.

The space in between the tubes and the side of the wall

is just a little too small for those posts on top,

creating the perfect amount of friction

so that the bricks stick together.

- You could basically put a pencil eraser

right in between the posts.

You could snap the other piece of Lego onto it,

and it clutches right up.

That’s clutch power, y’all.

(pensive hip hop music)

- The clutch power that now Lego bricks have

mean that there is no limit to what you can produce.

You could build essentially whatever shape

your mind would lead you to.

- Kids can build sideways, they can build upside down.

They can build in any which way they want.

- With enough Lego pieces,

you can produce curves or towers

that are really impressive, that are dazzling,

that are something that inspire you to new literal heights.

(gentle triumphant music)

- Godtfred insists that the Lego brick

is shown in the window.

He wants kids to see and touch and feel

and know how it works.

So he goes around and he makes sure that in every country,

in every store, these Lego bricks are displayed,

and they’re displayed right.

- This is something that really sells itself

when people get their hands on it.

This becomes a landmark play thing

that spreads across Europe.

You never have enough Lego.

You always need more. You need the next one.

- Sales start to explode.

I mean, things are going great for Lego.

- [Narrator] But soon Godtfred is thrust

into uncharted territory.

- [Lowey] In 1958, Ole passes away.

- I speak from personal experience that as a young man,

when you lose your dad,

it’s like being in a hurricane with nothing to hold onto.

- [Lowey] Godtfred is now the head of the Lego company.

- So already Godtfred Christiansen is in this place

of incredible personal turmoil.

Now he’s got some really big shoes to fill.

- And that’s kind of when Godtfred

hits the ground running.

He creates a group called Lego Futura.

They’re visionaries, they’re engineers.

Their job is to dream up the next great Lego thing.

This is a huge time for Lego.

There’s smooth tiles, fences,

trees, arches.

They introduce the wheel. This is huge.

Lego ends up becoming the biggest tire manufacturer

in the world because there’s so many children

that want this wheel.

Everything they’re doing in the sixties

is setting them up for success to expand all over the globe.

- [Narrator] But there’s one market Godtfred

has yet to penetrate.

- If you’ve made successful inroads all over Europe,

what do you do next?

Well, you look at the biggest global market

that’s out there on the planet,

and that is the United States.

It’s got a baby boom happening,

and parents who’ve got kids and disposable income

to spend on their kids.

- But there’s a major problem.

They knew that they couldn’t create the supply

that was gonna be needed in the United States.

They didn’t have the sales force over there.

- There’s language differences.

There’s competitor products.

This is a big leap as a relatively small firm.

How do you accomplish this?

- [Narrator] Godtfred makes a mega deal to partner

with an American company that has all the right connections.

- [Announcer] Lego, the sensation of Europe,

now made in America by Samsonite.

- [Narrator] In the wrong industry.

- That’s right.

The building blocks your kid is playing with

right at this moment were actually first affiliated

with the company that made your grandparent’s luggage.

- Samsonite had knowledge of plastics.

They were a big advertiser on television,

but Samsonite wasn’t a toy company.

- The problem is because they needed

the partnership so intensely,

Christiansen agrees to a 99-year deal,

literally a century-long deal.

- I don’t think Samsonite had a clue

what they were getting into.

It was a disaster.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In 1961, Lego makes its move

to the biggest toy market in the world, the United States.

(whistle blowing)

- [Announcer] Lego is here.

Hey, kids! Look!

A whole new world to build.

- What Samsonite brought to the table

was they had a huge distribution network.

They were already out in the marketplace of America,

so Lego was just jumping into that.

- [Narrator] Godtfred has agreed to a 99-year deal,

but it quickly turns sour.

- Godtfred Christiansen is unhappy with this partnership.

He doesn’t like the fact that this incredibly inventive toy

for children is being being sold in the same manner

that luggage is being sold to adults.

- Samsonite is cheaping out on the quality of plastic

that they are using.

They also aren’t following with the whole Lego system

that Godtfred was so in favor of.

- At one point, Samsonite put out a Lego set

that had no Lego in it.

It’s just like a box of gears,

which is really not that fun to play with.

- [Narrator] By the mid-1960s,

Lego is pulling in $39 million annually,

but only a small fraction is coming from the U.S.

- Godtfred must have been horrified

that here his flagship product is being so devalued.

- [Narrator] With nearly a century left

on the Samsonite contract, Godtfred pulls the rip cord.

- Lego retracted their contract with Samsonite,

thinking that we can’t go on this way.

- Godtfred Christiansen is going to continue

paying them royalties up until 1989,

but Godtfred Christiansen has Lego back.

- [Narrator] Determined to take hold of the U.S. market,

Godtfred doubles down,

building his own production facility in Connecticut.

And he doesn’t stop there.

(upbeat hip hop music)

- In 1978, they launch what we call the mini-figs,

the figures that populate the Lego world

that you’ve been creating all this time.

- When Lego introduces the concept of the mini figure,

that had never been done before.

It’s completely revolutionary and it really changes

the way kids play with construction toys.

- [Narrator] In less than a decade,

Lego sales in the U.S. top $80 million,

far surpassing any other building toy

in the United States.

- The trick to Lego is the simplicity of Lego.

It’s the idea that you can succeed in building something

without any glue, without any kind of clamps.

They work on their own. It’s the simple click.

- Lego is up there as perhaps the greatest toy ever invented.

It’s simple and it’s light and it’s colorful,

and it’s durable and it’s high quality,

and it just works.

(bright orchestral music)

- In 1979, when Godtfred’s son takes over the company,

he makes a surprise move,

purchasing the rights to Hilary Page’s

original plastic brick.

- I think he wanted to make sure that, you know,

he not only did the right thing,

but also protected himself for future issues legally.

- [Narrator] Today, Lego generates $2.8 billion per year

in the U.S. alone.

- The company has made 400 billion Lego elements.

That’s 62 bricks for every person on the planet.

- Lego kind of outshone its predecessor Erector sets.

- [Bruce] Erector paved the way for Lego.

- Lego had a whole different ethos.

They had a different vision for how children would play.

For them, it was fun and creativity.

They were not trying to be what Erector was.

- A.C. Gilbert looked at Erector sets as a way

to educate kids,

to help inspire kids to become engineers,

doctors, scientists, things like that.

- It’s fulfilling what you’d expect a toy to do,

but it’s preparing the next generation of Americans

to step into their role.

- The Erector set was the toy that people

who built America played with in the last half

of the 20th century,

and you really cannot underestimate

how valuable that was.

- Suddenly, the modern world isn’t so foreign to everyone.

Suddenly it’s something kids can play with.

The Erector set becomes a way of helping build the world.

(bright dramatic music)