🧱 ⊕ 🧱
Toy Building Brick
U.S. Patent 3,005,282 · 1961
From the abstract
The invention relates to a toy building brick of the type comprising a hollow box-shaped main portion with a top wall and downwardly directed side walls, with primary coupling means in the form of projections extending from the top wall and secondary coupling means inside the main portion.
Note
The LEGO brick, in its modern stud-and-tube form. Ole Kirk Kristiansen had founded LEGO in Billund, Denmark, in 1932 (as a wooden-toy maker; the name from leg godt, 'play well'). His son Godtfred filed this patent in 1958, giving the brick its still-current internal-tube clutch system — the reason a 1958 brick still locks with a 2026 brick. The Danes consider it a national treasure; the company has remained family-owned for four generations. By 2025, more than 600 billion LEGO bricks had been produced — about 75 per person on Earth.