(phone rings) - Hi, it's Doug. The other day, I saw
something pretty amazing. Let me show you. Check out this race car. Isn't it cool? I love the circles all
over the hood and the door. Now, what's really amazing about this car is that it's made entirely
of Lego Technic pieces. It took over one million pieces to make, and the builders didn't use
any glue or special tape to stick it together. It's all Lego, even the engine. And check this out. It even drives. (upbeat music) Someone named Hendry has
a question about Lego. Let's give Hendry a call now. (phone rings) - Hi, Doug. - Hi, Hendry. - I have a question for you. How were Lego blocks invented? - That's a great question, and I know the perfect
person to answer it. His name is Jay Flores, and
he knows a lot about Lego. In fact, he's even been to the place where Lego bricks are made, but I'll let him tell you more about that. Let's give Jay a call now. (phone rings) - Hi, Doug. - Hi, Jay. - I hear you have a question for me. - I do, and it's a good one. Hendry wants to know,
how were Lego invented? - Ooh. This is a fun question. What might be even more surprising to you is not just how Lego was invented, but why Lego was invented. Lego is a type of block or toy brick, but Lego bricks are not the
only kind of building toys there are. In fact, children have been playing with different kinds of building
toys for hundreds of years. Before Lego bricks were ever invented, when a child wanted to build something, they would have to build
with these wooden blocks. And they can be a lot of
fun, but there's a problem. If you make a tower or
a castle out of them, especially some creation where you put all this time into it, your cat or a little sibling can come by, and, crash, it's all over! It's so frustrating when that happens. So toy inventors began
to focus on this problem, the problem of how to make
building toys stay together. But before I tell you anything more about what solutions they came up with, I'm curious, what kinds of
solutions can you come up with? Imagine if Lego hadn't been invented. What kinds of things would you do to make the block
creations stick together? Now would be a good time to
pause the video and discuss. Okay, you ready? Now, I don't know how you answered, but you may have said glue. That's definitely an idea,
and that makes sense. Glue sticks things together, like these toy airplane models. That's how these creations stay together. But there's, of course,
a downside to glue. Once you glue a model together, you can't take it apart again, and if you want to build something else, you have to buy a whole new set. So toymakers wanted to
figure out other ways to make building toys stick, like the inventor of these. These are Tinkertoys. They were some of the first building toys that stuck together without glue. See those round pieces with holes? You stick Tinkertoys together
by sticking sticks into them. The inventor of Tinkertoys
came up with the idea by watching kids outside playing with sticks and spools of thread. They're pretty fun to build with. Oh, and have you seen these? These are Lincoln Logs,
another early building toy. The logs stay together because
of each little notch on them. See that? The shape of the toy logs
are just like real logs they used to use to build real log cabins hundreds of years ago. See how the logs fit together? It's just like the toy. Now, most of these early building toys had one thing in common:
they were made of wood. In fact, most toys were
made of wood back then, including Lego toys. The Lego company was
started by a carpenter, someone who works with wood, who made wooden toys with
his 12-year-old child. They made wooden blocks and
cars, yo-yos and trains, like this one. The toys were pretty cool, but not a lot of people were buying them. In fact, some people started
telling the carpenter that he should quit
making toys altogether. The carpenter almost listened
to them, but then he saw this. It may not look like much, but this thing, called a plastic
injection molding machine, changed the way toys were made forever. Now instead of using wood to make toys, toymakers could mold melted plastic into any shape they wanted. They could make animals
and dolls, and these. You're looking at the first
ever plastic toy bricks. These weren't made by
Lego. These were different. They were called Kiddicraft bricks. The problem was, even though
these bricks clicked together, they still didn't stay together very well. They do have four round
bumps on the top like Lego, but on the bottoms, they
have open empty space. The Lego company liked
the idea of these bricks, but they thought, we can
make them even better. (upbeat music) They bought a plastic injection machine and got to work inventing a
new kind of classic brick, and after years of work,
they came up with this. Lego bricks have bumps
on the top of them, too, just like the Kiddicraft
bricks, but look at the bottoms. See the tubes underneath
on the Lego bricks? When you click the bumps
on top of the bricks into the tubes, they stay together better
than any of the other plastic or wooden building toys at the time. Now, a brick like this
would be really hard to make with wood, but with plastic,
it was a lot easier, and with plastic, they could make a lot of
bricks really cheaply. These new Lego bricks works really well. Now, kids could build anything at all, and their creations would stick together. They could build castles
and Star Wars ships. They could even build a
tower over 10 stories tall, like these teachers did
in Tel Aviv, Israel. And when they wanted to
build something else, they could just take them
apart and start all over. Kids loved these new
click-together bricks, and Lego became one of the most
popular toys on the planet. In fact, if you lined
up all the Lego pieces sold in one year, they would wrap around the
Earth more than five times. That's a lot of bricks. When I was a kid, I loved Lego. One of my favorite things to do was to dump all my Lego
bricks on the floor and build whatever popped
into my imagination. I built spaceships and
pirate ships and cars, whatever I felt like, and if
I didn't like what I built, I would just take it apart
and build something else. And even though I'm grown
up now, I still love Lego. In fact, one of my favorite trips ever was to Billund, Denmark,
where Lego bricks are made. That's me on the roof of the Lego House. The birthplace of the Lego brick. It was so much fun seeing
all of the creations you could make out of Lego. So I guess you can say
Lego bricks were invented to solve a problem, the problem of making
building toys stick together without them coming apart. So that's all for today's question. Thank you Hendry for asking it. Now, it's time to go build. And remember, you don't
need Lego bricks to build. You can create with anything. And you definitely don't need directions. Just follow your imagination, and you might just be surprised
by what you come up with. - [Doug] Now, for the next episode, I reached into our question jar and picked out three
questions send into us that we're thinking about answering next. When this video is done playing,
you'll get to vote on one. You can choose from: why
do light bulbs get hot; how did people clean their teeth before toothpaste was
invented; or, how do kites fly? So submit your vote when the video's over. We want to hear from all of you watching. There are mysteries all around us. Stay curious, and see you next week.
