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Lego Marks 50th Anniversary With Reintroduced Building Bricks

By Christian Wienberg

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Lego A/S, Europe's largest toymaker, commemorated the 50th anniversary of its interlocking plastic building bricks by re-introducing a set from five decades ago.

The Town Plan set, which contains 1,000 blocks and costs 1,199 kroner ($237), went on sale today along with a hundred other new items on the Web site of the Billund, Denmark-based company. Google Inc., owner of the world's most popular Internet search engine, marked the occasion by using depictions of the bricks to spell its own name on its main Web site.

Lego, which estimates that children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with its bricks, was founded in 1932 as a maker of wooden toys. The company has made more than 400 billion of the plastic blocks since they were patented in 1958 by the father of current owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Its name comes from the first letters of the words ``leg godt,'' Danish for ``play well.''

``Our workers are celebrating, and we want to show the world some of the first Lego sets,'' spokeswoman Charlotte Simonsen said by telephone. Kristiansen was pictured as a child on the box of the original Town Plan set and returns in the anniversary version, Lego's Web site shows.

Town Plan, one of Lego's first sets, contains materials to make buildings including a gas station, several cars and a fountain, according to Simonsen. The bricks are in ``1950s retro style,'' she said.

Lego didn't pay Google to commemorate the occasion, the spokeswoman said. The company advised Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Lego fans who founded Mountain View, California-based Google, of the anniversary and they were happy to mark it, she said.

Page built an ink-jet printer using Lego bricks when he was a student at the University of Michigan, according to Google's corporate Web site. The company regularly changes the style in which its name is spelled on its main site to mark occasions such as the soccer World Cup that was played in Germany in 2006.

The toymaker is the world's most respected and trusted company, according to a May 24 survey by the New York-based Reputation Institute.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christian Wienberg in Copenhagen at cwienberg@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: January 28, 2008 07:47 EST