During the holidays, Europe 1 returns to the origins of inventions that have become cult.

Today the Lego, these famous bricks from Denmark, which have and continue to rock millions of children around the world.

>> Every day in 

Historically yours

 presented by Stéphane Bern and Matthieu Noël, 

David Castello-Lopes looks

 back on the origins of an object or a concept.

During the Christmas holidays, Europe 1 invites you to rediscover ten inventions that have become cult.

Today, the

famous Lego,

invented

in the 1950s

by

the Dane

Ole Kirk Christiansen, who was greatly inspired by an English construction set.

A Dane who was not successful ...

Where do Lego come from?

That's a good question asked David Castello-Lopes.

Invention stories can be separated into two groups: joyful ones where the inventor becomes millionaires, like Trivial Pursuit or instant noodles;

and those, sad, where the inventor receives little or no money for his invention, as with the windshield wipers or the game "Docteur Maboul".

Well the Lego belong more to this second category. 

The story begins in 1932, when a Danish gentleman by the name of Ole Kirk Christiansen starts making wooden toys - cubes, small animals, etc.

He decides to call his company Lego, which is a contraction of two Danish words, Leg and Godt, which means "play well".

But initially, his business did not go very well, mainly because of the Great Depression. 

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... until it was (very heavily) inspired by an English construction game

But one day, an English salesman who sells plastic molding machines comes his way.

Ole Kirk Christiansen realizes that the machine produces little plastic bricks that fit together.

They look like the Lego that we know today and are then manufactured and sold in England under the Kiddicraft brand. 

Some time later, in the 1950s, Ole Kirk Christiansen began to market his first sets of Lego bricks, which were simply improved copies of Kiddicraft and which, for their part, would be so successful worldwide to the point of being today the biggest toy seller in the world.

The appearance of figurines in the late 1970s

A success, it must be said, which was nevertheless increased when Lego invented the little minifigures at the end of the 1970s, the famous little yellow men who have no articulation at the knees.

Recently, the company has been trying to make an ecological shift by reducing the use of plastic, partially replaced by plant-based plastic parts.