Legos were certainly not the only building toys on the market during the better part of the twentieth century, but they were the ones that quintessentially represented the culture of the time. Wooden building blocks had been around for thousands of years and symbolized a simple, pre-industrial era. Toys like Erector and Meccano sets, with their nuts and bolts and metal girders, captured the aspirations of the skyscraper era experienced in the 1910s and 1920s. Legos, however, as interlocking plastic bricks 1 1/4 by 5/8 inches with eight knobs on top and three tubes underneath, combined the concept of a simple toy with newer materials.

The concept for the Lego brick began in 1932 when Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen used scrap material from his furniture-making business to make wooden bricks for children's toys. In 1947 the Lego Company introduced plastic and was making all of their bricks out of plastic by 1960. These...