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By 1951 plastic toys accounted for half of the Lego company's output, even though the Danish trade magazine Legetøjs-Tidende ("Toy Times"), visiting the Lego factory in Billund in the early 1950s, felt that plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys. This motto, which is still used today, was created by Christiansen to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly. The Lego Group's motto, "only the best is good enough" ( Danish: det bedste er ikke for godt, literally "the best isn't excessively good") was created in 1936. The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate, were a development of the traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time. Lego had received a sample of the Kiddicraft bricks from the supplier of an injection-molding machine that it purchased. These bricks were based on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which had been patented in the United Kingdom in 1939 and released in 1947. In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". In 1947, Lego expanded to begin producing plastic toys. In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well". The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. Two Lego Duplo bricks with a standard brick for comparison As of July 2015, 600 billion Lego parts had been produced. Movies, games, competitions and eight Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand. The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Anything constructed can be taken apart again, and the pieces reused to make new things. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously coloured interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. As of 2021, Lego was the largest toy company in the world. Lego ( / ˈ l ɛ ɡ oʊ/ LEG-oh, Danish: stylised as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark.
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