10 Cool Facts About LEGO

Here are 10 cool facts about LEGO.

LEGO pieces come in an array of colors, sizes, and kits and present vast creative opportunities. What parent hasn’t stepped on a tiny LEGO piece and cursed the colorful blocks that so delight children everywhere? Despite that, adults and kids alike can’t seem to get enough of them. Here are 10 cool facts about the iconic building blocks.


Number 10. During the frenzied shopping of the holiday season almost 28 LEGO sets are sold every second. In calmer times they’re bought at a per-second rate of 7.

Number 9. Millions were once lost at sea. In 1997 a shipping container filled with nearly 5 million LEGO pieces slipped off of a ship and into the ocean. Since then, they’ve been washing up on UK beaches and feeding a unique collecting culture.

Number 8. They’re finely crafted. The manufacturing system is so precise that less than 20 in a million are considered sub par. That’s especially impressive given that the factory’s rate of production is 1.7 million objects per hour.

Number 7. A handful of bricks can bring loads of entertainment. A math professor calculated that 6 8-studded LEGO pieces can be configured in over 915 million different ways.

Number 6. Kids are obsessed with them. It’s estimated that the children of the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks and sets.

Number 5. Germans buy more of them than anybody. The best selling sets there are TECHNIC and CITY. In the United States, the second largest buyer of the toys, consumers show a preference for BIONICLE and Star Wars.

Number 4. The largest LEGO structure ever built weighs 23 tons. It’s a replica of the Star Wars X-Wing fighter and nearly 5 and a half million pieces were used to construct it.

Number 3. The Taj Mahal is the largest set ever made. It contains nearly 6 thousand individual pieces. The Millennium Falcon, although not the titleholder, is also an impressively stocked set, its box brimming with just over 5 thousand components.

Number 2. Mr. Gold minifigures could be worth their weight in gold. Even though they’re just plastic, some have sold for upwards of a thousand dollars. For their 10th series of Minifigures, the toy company threw 5 thousand of them into random boxes.

Number 1. The company has the coolest business cards ever. Some employees carry around personalized minifigures in lieu of the traditional slips of sturdy paper. In addition to containing names and contact info, the little LEGO people are modeled to resemble their carriers.

What’s your favorite thing about LEGO stuff?