Biography of Ole Kirk Christiansen

Ole Kirk Christiansen (inventor of lego bricks)

Ole Kirk Kristiansen was a Danish carpenter. He was born on April 07, 1891. In 1932, he founded the construction toy company The Lego Group. Over the course of his working life, Kristiansen developed his business from a small wood-working shop that sold household products into a wooden toy manufacturer.

His parents were Jens Niels Christiansen and Kirstine Christiansen. Although the family were poor, Kristiansen was able to receive a basic high-school education. It was while he was working as a farmhand from the age of six that Kristiansen developed a fascination with whittling wood, in between the two days per week that he attended school. In 1905, when Kristiansen was 14, he began working as an apprentice for his older brother, Kristian Bonde Christiansen. In 1911 he left Denmark and went to work in carpentry for five years in Germany.

Kristiansen's company moved primarily to the production of wooden toys, such as yo-yos, pull-along animals and trucks. In doing so, Kristiansen had made the decision to focus his products on the development of children. With this turning point, Kristiansen effectively defined the core philosophy of the company, which would eventually be expressed in its name in 1934. Lego is a shortened form of the Danish words Leg godt, meaning "play well", and the company eventually became known as The Lego Group. 

In 1947, the Lego company was the first toy manufacturer in Denmark to purchase a plastic injection moulding machine, which was so expensive that it cost more than twice the previous year's profits. This move to producing plastic toys was particularly challenging for Kristiansen, who had spent his life working with wood. By 1949, the business was producing a plastic product called the Automatic Binding Brick. 

In 1950, Kristiansen's son Godtfred was named junior managing director and the company spent the next decade focusing on the development of the plastic brick, which was modified from a self-locking building brick invented by Hilary Fisher Page. Despite poor sales in the early 1950s, the company persevered in developing its plastic brick by eventually using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), thereby achieving the necessary "clutch power" or friction that holds two bricks together. This design for the Lego brick was patented in Copenhagen on 28 January 1958.