Building Things

     My mother and father were very thoughtful at Christmas time. They selected gifts for my two brothers and I which my parents believed fit our interests. In my case, they always picked things which were technology related. None of us used the term technology back then, but that is how I think of the gifts now. The earliest ones had to do with building things, and they became hobbies in my earliest years and now to my latest years.

The earliest hobbies I can remember involved putting pieces of wood or metal together to create something. The products were Tinkertoy, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets. The LEGO brand was not yet available in the United States when I was growing up. If the LEGO products had come a dozen or so years earlier, I surely would have been an early adopter.

In the early 1900s, stonemason Charles Pajeau and his partner Robert Petit studied how children created a huge number of shapes with sticks, pencils, and spools of thread.  They invented a toy product which they called the “Thousand Wonder Toy”. They later called the product Tinkertoy. A Tinkertoy construction set included wooden wheels about an inch in diameter. The wheels had holes on the sides and around the edge. The set included sticks which you could insert in the wheels. The target market was young boys who would create elaborate structures. Today, the skill of creating the 3D Tinkertoy might be called spatial intelligence, and it would certainly not be limited to boys. I liked the idea of creating things shown in pictorials which came with the construction set. I don’t think I was particularly creative, but I enjoyed building things.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a famous American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator. His creative period spanned more than 70 years, and he designed more than 1,000 structures.  Mr. Wright’s lesser-known son, John Lloyd Wright, while watching the construction of one of his father’s designs, an earthquake-proof building in Japan, got the idea for a construction toy he called Lincoln Logs.  He named the toy after President Abraham Lincoln’s fabled childhood cabin.  The logs measured three quarters of an inch in diameter and, analogous to real logs used in a log cabin, Lincoln Logs are notched so they can be laid at right angles to each other to form rectangles resembling buildings. The toy set I remember included roofs, chimneys, windows and doors, which made a construction project look real. A full set also included animals and human figures made to the same scale as the buildings. I liked Lincoln Logs projects better than Tinkertoy projects because they were much more stable. The spindly sticks of Tinkertoy objects were wobbly and often fell apart.

 Of all the toy construction sets, my favorite was the Erector Set. Alfred Carlton Gilbert commuted from Connecticut into New York City and was fascinated by the girders and bridges which supported the electric railroad lines. His fascination inspired him to create a construction set which gave kids everything they needed to build their own miniature cities and related infrastructure.

A basic Erector Set included various metal beams with regularly spaced holes for assembly using nuts and bolts. It was possible to build a strong but lightweight structure using pieces of stamped sheet steel, held together by the bolts and nuts. The sheet metal came in straight or curved pieces in various shapes and colors. More advanced structures could be built using hardened steel rods and screw clamps which allowed the construction of hinges. Mechanical power could be added using rotating parts such as pulleys, gears, wheels, and levers. Later, Erector Sets included AC-powered or battery-powered DC electric motors. The sets also included gears which could increase the torque and effective mechanical power. Later, sets added miniature light bulbs and simple switches to control electrical power.

What I liked was the ability to build a model, then take it apart and build something else. Most items I built were less than a foot tall and a foot wide or less. Creating something using nuts and bolts was much more substantial than the Tinkertoy or Lincoln Log approach. Building trucks, buildings, cranes, and other ideas was limited only by one’s imagination and ingenuity.

LEGO products were introduced in the United States in 1962 when I was 17. The name LEGO is an abbreviation of the two Danish words “leg godt”, meaning “play well”.  The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. The company has passed from father to son and is now owned by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, a grandchild of the founder. The company has come a long way from a small carpenter’s workshop to the largest toy company in the world in terms of revenue. In 2022, LEGO generated $9.28 billion. 

LEGO kits come in loose sets of plastic pieces called bricks. The bricks have studs and holes which enable bricks to be connected. There are more than 900 million different ways of combining six eight-stud bricks. The company has made 400 billion LEGO bricks and other plastic elements. If stacked on top of one another, the pieces would form 10 towers reaching all the way from the Earth to the Moon. The LEGO manufacturing process is so precise that only 18 out of 1 million LEGO bricks are defective. More than 400 million people around the world have played with LEGO bricks. In 2000, The British Association of Toy Retailers named the LEGO brick “Toy of the Century”, beating the teddy bear, Barbie and Action Man. The largest LEGO structure ever created is the Tower Bridge replica in London. The brick count was 5,805,846. It took five months to build.

About five years ago, one of my sons gave me a LEGO set to build a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle. The kit included 1,023 parts. The engineering behind the kit was truly remarkable. The pistons in the cylinders are moving parts. It seemed no details were left out. The assembly took at least several days of enjoyment, and suffering through a few errors I had to correct. The LEGO Fat Boy is the same maroon color as the real Fat Boy I purchased in 2003.

I was so pleased with the result of the Fat Boy kit, I ordered a LEGO International Space Station kit (864 pieces). I have tackled 12 LEGO kits to date. They contain almost 20,000 bricks. My most recent kit is the Notre-Dame of Paris, France. I finished it in Florida on January 15. Number 12 is the Back to the Future kit (1,872 bricks). It is proving to be the most complex of the twelve.

Much more about technology at johnpatrick.com and some LEGO pictures in the Current Events section below.