Bricks Before LEGO
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- LEGO didn't originally invent the plastic building brick, they copied it. Learn about KiddiCraft and other pre-LEGO makers of studded building blocks including ELGO and products made from rubber & even wood.
⭐ My new LEGO reviews: / jangslegoreviews
📺 Twitch live streams: / itsthejang
🏙 My LEGO city: / jangcity
⏩ LEGO speed builds: / jangbuilds
▶️ Chill real-time builds: / purebuilds
My preferred online shop is Amazon: amzn.to/2qllzg5
If you use my affiliate links I may get a tiny commission to help keep the channels going!
More places I shop: www.jangbricks...
LEGO news & set research: www.Brickset.com
🟠 Become a supporter on Patreon! / jangbricks
Join the community for exclusive chat streams, get your minifig added to New Jang City, & more!
All comments are moderated to maintain a safe, positive environment. Bad behavior is rejected, abusers are reported & blocked. jangbricks.com...
✔️ Answers to Frequently Asked Questions: www.jangbricks...
🎮 Twitch: itstheJANG
📷 Instagram: jangbricks4real
🐤 Twitter: JangBricks
🌐 Web: JANGBRiCKS.com
All of my verified media accounts: www.jangbricks...
(Assume anything else is fake!)
The opinions I express are mine and mine alone and not for sale for any price. Ads, when shown, are selected & placed by TH-cam itself. - บันเทิง
Both Meccano and Erector also produced stackable brick system sets in the early days. Some casual mentions on the Internet suggest that one of these may have been first marketed in the 30s, competing with Bild-O-Brik for the title of earliest studded brick. I have not been able to find any substantiated info confirming the start of either of these systems, though, with the earliest dated mention of Meccano-Brik appearing in a 1938 copyright list. Erector did have another system called Brik-Tor dating back to at least 1916, but that featured non-studded bricks with alignable holes through which you'd insert rods to keep everything together. Hopefully the comments section will bring in some interesting additional pieces of real information & evidence to add to the interesting backstory of bricks before LEGO!
Love your vids!
bueatiful music jang
+JANGBRiCKS brilliant video :D
so many older models? versions? but wow
so many older models? versions? but wow
Lego fans: “I absolutely hate mega blocks for ripping off legos classic block design”
Lego: *nervous sweating*
If you said Lepin then yeah. Mega Blocks has made some cool brick innovations.
Dunno how they are now, but I recall hating Mega Bloks, not because they copied Lego's design, but because they made lower quality blocks that frequently didn't stick together nearly as well as Lego, were somewhat off-color with color sometimes even varying slightly within a set, and just generally felt cheap. Of course you get a lot of bricks for the money so meh. I also recall some interesting pieces from them, like hinge plates that snap together on all edges, though trouble getting things to stick together well sometimes limited their usefulness.
I also had a bunch of bricks from an apparently defunct Lego competitor called Tyco. The bricks were closer to the quality of Lego that mixing them in a build wasn't so noticeable. More interestingly though, they had half-height pieces rather than Lego's 1/3-height ones, which could be combined to produce odd thicknesses if needed.
fun fact: my 82 year old father is still alive and he worked at the lego factory in denmark when he was a teenager while they still made wood toys. they were just starting with plastic when he left. The danish government wanted him to join the armed forces so he went to sweden and then to canada.
country boy that's awesome!!!
country boy lucky, but interesting 👍
i wouldn't mind more videos that are done in this style
agreed
agreed
+arf234 agreed
+arf234 Pecking order...
ARC command o
In your Lego city, It would be cool if you make a museum with these inside. :)
that's actually not a bad idea!
That would be awesome, a museum. You could have artifacts in there of old, forgotten themes too and things like that!!!
Yeah that would be really cool
What a great idea! No sarcasm intended.
that would be epic
Excellent video! I love great LEGO videos, but love great LEGO videos that somebody can learn from even better.
+just2good i subbed to you your videos are good
+SMan BlueLizard
They're 'Just2good' aren't they?
Yes! They are! And thanks!
+Pure Competizione wow, really?
I love you just2good.
This is very interesting! LEGO may not have invented the studded plastic brick toy, but they certainly perfected it.
Lego is a knockoff of a knockoff which is a spinoff of another knockoff which is a knockoff of a knockoff of a rubber building brick
which makes Mega Bloks... [mind implodes]
When I was around 7/8 in about 1985 my dad came home from work one night with a a big black bag and inside it were about 4/5 large ice cream tubs full of lego-like bricks. They fitted with and were identical in size to lego bricks but didn't have the tubes on the bottom and the studs were just plain, slightly dimpled in the middle. The bricks were mostly only 2x2, 2x4 and 2x8 size and there was one 16x32 size green board, along with a few 1x2 of each colour. The colours were just black, white, yellow, blue and red. The odd thing was the windows though - they were all red and of a completely different design, though they still fitted well with lego. Some of them were more like they were designed to be wooden screens or panels, with detailing on. But the main curiosity was the large amount of roofing parts. So many that they were in their own box and all were red. They had tile details on and were totally different designs to lego bricks, even though you could build a complete complex looking roof with them and it would attach to lego perfectly and look like it was meant to. Thing is, they were much, much more realistic in appearance than lego bricks and much more detailed, as the wooden panels and windows were. There were no doors / wheels / minifigs etc.
I've been watching quite a lot of videos about lego lately and I've seen nothing remotely like them. It was just curiosity at first but now I'm starting to wonder what I actually had and if they were anything unusual. I wonder if they were possibly from a company that used the lego style size and system but the sets were intended to be a bit more realistic or aimed at older children.
I still have the majority of them and the plastic quality has held up as well as my real childhood lego has. They look more brittle, but I don't actually ever remember breaking any. Maybe I was just a careful kid.
One thing I do remember about them though - lots of them had a light coating of black dust on them. When I got a bit older I remember asking my mother if I could clean them all in the kitchen sink and what she thought the dust was. The answer was a bit shocking. My father had a friend who had lost his son and wife in a housefire.
For about 7 years of my life I grew up playing with some poor dead kid's weird fake lego alongside my own . . . no wonder they didn't tell me that when I was seven. I'm not sure how my dad got them though. Maybe it upset the guy to keep them around but he thought it was wrong to throw them away? Maybe it gave him some comfort to think there was still a little boy playing with his son's bricks somewhere. Who knows?
If anyone has their memory jogged and thinks they might be able to tell me what brand they were or anything I'd be interested and appreciate it though. It would be really interesting to see if the company ever produced full sets or colour brochures, especially as the roofing parts were so well designed. A completed model with a large amount of them could have looked really amazing, probably more so than the way lego were designing the roofs of their building at the time.
Thanks if you read this far anyway! :-)
I know Tyco had a design with windows. But they also had doors in the same style. The roof were two green bases taped together (that's what they say to do in the packet!) The bricks are quite sturdy because they are thick plastic.
I have a weird story of my own with fake bricks. There was a red plastic trashcan in my grandparent's garage's attic area. In them were old and odd lego bricks. Then I saw they weren't lego but a knockoff. A very cheap knockoff, the bricks were hand-moulded it seemed because some fit together but some didn't! The colours were red, white, blue, yellow, and lime green. 2x6, 2x4 for blue, green and yellow. 1x1, 1x2, 2x2 for red and white. They also don't say a brand. I believe I still have some of them but I honestly don't know. It wasn't that long ago, less than 6 years ago.
I think I know what they are I think there a branch of bricks that Nintendo yes Nintendo made.
They are called n&b blocks
They were produced in the 1960s
John calcono has a link below. Sorry if I pernounsed that rong
Man, people seem to forget about the 7000 B.C. clay bricks...
lol
Yeah. I remember those days... Kids now wouldn't understand.
I have good memories playing with those back then...
+TheWip9 I don't think they were studded back then...or used for toys :p
+TheWip9 Just think about the Egyptian Pyramids. Those are like supersized Legos too!
Something oddly satisfying about seeing the little rubber bricks all stacked up.
Maybe cause they look like real worn out bricks. Makes the builds feel actually lived in.
I wouldnt be surprised if ancient Mesopotamian children were playing with clay interlocking bricks
Most memorial quote;
*IT'S MORE FUN TO CRATE A NEW MODEL THAN IT IS TO COPY*
Very true :)
crate? btw y u using caps
So let me get this straight...
Some crappy rubber building block sets had inverse cheese slopes but Lego doesn't.
Correction: Old, not necessarily crappy.
+Toa Scrub have you avenged SOLEK yet and killed eljay and his chainsaw?
MR. swezz We'll get to that shortly.
Once murder is legal somewhere.
Toa Scrub and don't forget about TTV_MESONAK
+Bricks Of Awesome Actually, if you noticed, some of the things jang showed were built upside-down. You can see some 'studs' or 'knobs' (whatever you want to call them) sticking out from underneath the bricks in the windows.
When he was flipping through the manuals he couldn’t have made it more satisfying to watch. I watched it over 10 times!
If the Minibrix was popular instead of LEGO... Then no one would ever get hurt by bricks
wow! check out the prices on those things! $30 would have been INSANELY expensive back in the 1930s!
I remember when i was a kid there was this brand that started selling mini bricks. Like, REAL bricks. That you had to stick together with mortar. Needlessly to say it was very messy and my parents NEVER bought me another set again. 😂
So basically building bricks was a huge line of copying someone else's stuff? Nice.
thanks so much for the history lesion
+Thomas. Mulhearn Very welcome! I enjoyed this. I feel there's still more to learn of the story, too.
+JANGBRiCKS Does this mean we can look forward to more videos like this? That would be great!
Still looking forward to the Ghostbusters Firehouse review though! :-)
+JANGBRiCKS You will be do some reviews of Power Miners?
+JANGBRiCKS Yes, I'm quite curious about other makers at the time and whether the interlocking bricks had even earlier roots.
+JANGBRiCKS - Please consider writing a book on the history of toy building bricks. I think that many people would read such a book. Thanks for all the videos.
Just goes to show it's not who does it first but who does it best.
The music at the end would come to be if Mario galaxy and Minecraft had a baby of music!
??
This is absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for this great overview!
ELGO: exists
Lego: wait that's illegal
Me in 2016: This is interesting.
Me now: **cries in nostalgia**
Now I'm pretty sure the only reason why LEGO doesn't try to get a full copyright for their LEGO brick and the sue the pants off guys like Mega Bloks or Kreo is because they know that, when you really come down to it, they aren't so different from those guys.
They had a patent for decades, starting in 1958. Mega made their blocks after that patent expired. LEGO did then proceed to attempt to sue Mega into submission (as they've done continually to other competitors since) and the courts ruled soundly in favor of Mega.
My grandmother on my mother's side had American Bricks and another similar brick with far bigger "pegs" on the top. In the 80s, I used to play with them whenever I was there. Also had Lincoln Logs.
Definetly one of my favourite videos on youtube
Some of those designs are really good for their time
He's a fun fact you may not know, in the 1990s Lego brought kiddicraft before they copyrighted the brick and went after Tyco
Who said that we danes could'nt play the monopoly game XD
The kid who said it first: Kiddicraft
The kid who said it louder: Lego
Crazy to think my grandparents would of played with these
Crazy!
A piece of history. Truly breath taking.
yes
Maybe put them in a museum for your Lego city??
Neat idea. I wish LEGO would make an ACTUAL LEGO City museum set with a bunch of old pieces that they don't make anymore from the Castle, Fright Knights and Western themes. That would be so cool!
5:40 those prices almost look reasonable until you start calculating for inflation lol! Estimating 1955 for the instructions makes that No. 1 set $72 in 2021 dollars. Those deluxe sets are just mind-blowingly expensive!
ITS MORE FUN TO CREATE A NEW MODEL THAN TO COPY
this is what made the great generation great
The way those rubber bricks look today almost makes it look like real bricks, save for the studs. If you were to put that on a model diorama I'm sure people would be thoroughly impressed with the realistic look of the brick replica
Looking at those old models... really makes you appreciate how much more there is to do with Lego these days.
So no one can complain about knock off lego because lego is a knockoff itself. Right?
i wish Jang would teach us more then entertain and inspire. id love to hear about color histories OOH or how different piece shapes come to be, how do they decide the shape, dimensions or the ever important "connection points" on pieces
So many copies, so much history! Next thing you know, archeologists will find strange looking blocks in the catacombs of Africa that were able to connect together...hmm...
I have a black fake 1x2 brick (that is the size of a system 1x2) that says "Better Blocks" and since I have some ancient Lego stuff (stage prop figures and a printed brick of the old shell logo), I'm pretty sure it's from the 70's or the 80's.
So LEGO bricks is basically a rip-off of a spin-off that is also a rip-off of another rip-off that is a spin-off of a rip-off brand. Very interesting world we live in
I was given a small set of bricks in 1947. I believe, but I'm not positive, that they were made by Meccano but were not sold under that name. The set consisted of two sizes (four pins and eight pins) and five colours (red, white, green, yellow and blue). For some inexplicable reason, all the colours except red came in both sizes. I later sent off some Christmas money and received a box containing only small red bricks. The slots in the ends were to permit a thin strip of wood (included in the set) to be threaded through to support bricks that had no bricks under them. This would make possible a bridge, for example.
Lol, as a Dane, it was so fun seeing you not even want to try to say: "Plastic Byggeklodser"
When plastic goes extinct but lego still continues to make bricks: 3:09
?
So your telling me that LEGO is a copy of a copy which copied some-other company which was a copy of anthor compony which copied author compony?
Good thing LEGO came along, as my childhood was built (No pun intended) on pretty much nothing but LEGO.
"It's more fun to create a new model than it is to copy it"
Ironically, thats kinda fitting for the video
That ELGO and LEGO coincidental name is just so awesome
Lego be like:
i was bad but now im good
LEGO grew far more than past bricks, they have so many uniquely made models. And don't even get me started with technic pieces. And minifigures too.
I feel like I just warped into an alternate reality
The mark of a true dedicated collector is to find interest in the present but also the past of his passion centre of focus. Very nice video.
I actually have some of those Kiddicraft bricks. I always thought they were the old Lego bricks, but now I know. I found them buried in the dirt at my old house in Iowa. I'll have to dig them up from my large collection of Lego and see if they're worth anything still.
I just love channels like this. Its so relaxing, both the music and your voice. I read the description too, I like the safe aspect.
And with uploads this regular, theres nothing anyone can complain about, as far as I can tell.
Very educational,
I’d say that the interlocking brick system is such a good and simple idea for a toy that it would eventually have been invented no matter what. So if aliens exist, they probably have lego too :)
Those builds with the rubber bricks at the end are so awesome
I would love to see a video in a similar style of Lego unique parts or on the history of Lego and how they nearly went out of business
+AQUANTUMg Well, the reason they went out of buisness is because they were prodicing huge amounts of custom pieces that took away a lot of the building aspects of their products. When they nearly went out of buisness they realised that the building part is what made their products uniqe, they started to include more ginerik pieces in their sets for more of a building experience.
Hope this helped!
+AQUANTUMg What Richard said. That's what turned me off LEGO in the late 90s. They assumed the fun was in playing with the end-product rather than assembling it, resulting in low-piece counts, low re-usability for custom stuff and generally took the fun out of building. Seems like they focused on a 3-5yo demographic and alienated all the older fans in the process.
+Richard Castanon not all of them were miserable failures thoe galidor bombed sure but knights kingdom did ok and bionicle was a huge success because of the high peice count larger sets probaly thoe like the rahi and axalara
+Kimon Froussios I agree. I have spent a whole lot of money in the past 4 years on these colourful bits of plastic. the fun is the opening of the box.then sorting ready to start and finally the build. sure you can rebuild the set, but, the magic only happens the first time you build. that's why I love technic and Lego creator sets the best. mechanical engineering in plastic and creator being Lego as it should be.
Honestly i like old legos
Using your imagination to build something
You wanted starwars
Boom
A block as a person
Thats how i played and I rarely used the figures
That was great! The idea of "show and don't tell" is brilliant.
No baseplates?! Only a "frame" under the building.
1:37 it was a that time that the bane of our feet’s existence was born
"Jeff's foot accidentally landed on his son's LEGO BRICK.
The sheer pain he faced cannot be described. His foot landed on the brick's bottom and his nervous system went into shock. He knew his foot would never be the same for the next hour. He immediately fell down and yelped out in a shrill cry. He knew that if he could back in time to prevent LEGO's existence, he would have a healthier and better foot. He said, "God dang these LEGOS" ".
The ABB's are just fantastically genuine and original with no tubes on the bottom. That's what Ole put in his pocket.
You sir are the Lego VSauce. ;)
This is like Oreo being actually a copy of Sunshine Biscuit's Hydrox. However, Oreo eventually exceeded it in popularity which resulted in the Hydrox coming to be perceived as a knockoff, even though it was the original. Hydrox was largely discontinued in 1999 after Sunshine was acquired by Keebler. If you don't believe me, the whole text from 'however' until 'Keebler' is entirely copied from Wikipedia. I thought that would fit with this video
$150.00! That would be like $500 today because prices back then were very different. No wonder they didn’t sell well😬
There were similar bricks in my home town in germany around 1947. They were called B.O.B (Bauen ohne Bindemittel). They look a bit like Modern lego Bricks but they were not made out of plastic.
Thank you for your comment! I've never heard of those before. They were rubber, it appears?
They were made out of the same material as normal bricks. Just google Bauen ohne Bindemittel. You will find some Pictures.
They are really rare to find these days.
Thank goodness this isn't marked for kids
the background music at the end was perfect
5:06 i can actually see this being a really cool lego set (in the same size as the white house perhaps?)
The end half has such calming music, I loved it anyways.
I have entire bucket of Kiddicraft bricks at my grandparent's house!
I actually have a Bild-O-Brik that my grandfather gave me.
I wonder what it would feel like to build with the rubber ones. Would they squeak? Be sticky? It would be really fun to try out old toys like this, but maybe recreations so the originals don't get ruined.
Make a museum moc with these peices in it and some mega construx peices and make it look like something from outer space. If you do this, add in other stuff, too.
I actually have a 2x8 LEGO brick without holes on the bottom. Does that really mean it was build before 1958? It doesn't have that slit in it though.
This is a great example that it doesn't matter what you have, it's what you do with it.
Thanks for the history lesson, very interesting!
Wow, so were all of these genuine bricks from their respective time periods? Pretty impressing of the rubber bricks to still be in such good condition if they are!
Also, these things weren't cheap. I think it was in the booklet for one of the rubber bricks, but I saw $60 in there, which in the 1930's was no small sum of money.
Yeah!
+lotto77102 Yeah some of those prices are downright Earth-shattering when you adjust for inflation. Those little erasers were for some *rich* kids!
I feel like im watching a government conspiracy
The creator of self locking building bricks took hvis own life without knowing about LEGO O.o
His*
I highly doubt that's true, sounds like some bollocks the internet would spit out.
+Courage It's actually very likely true, and corroborated by the man's own daughter. You should look it up.
JANGBRiCKS Oh, hey jang. I'm sure you can see where I'm coming from, there's always lies people make up from these kinds of stories. I'll look it up anyways.
Ironically, I got an Eggo waffles ad on this video. Eggo's slogan that appears in their commercials (more in the older ones) is "Lego my Eggo." Slang for "Let go of my Eggo." I wonder if there's ever been a lawsuit against them by Lego, or even them acknowledging this term?
The slang is "Leggo my Eggo"
The term ‘leggo’ is just a normal term, and people genuinely do use it, eg. “leggo of my stuff!”
I’m just impressed that you managed to get your hands on these.
I think I have some ELGO bricks
LEGO
1:54
The never ending toys copies to the point you don't know who is the original creator of whom. And the history still continues. I remember when I was a kid there were so many plastic brick inspired toys, all kind of plastic and metal educational building sets far better and cheaper then lego sets, buying lego sets would be insane when you have a much better alternative. Only in the 90s lego finally caught my attention but it was still expensive so buying anything would be almost out of question I had to settle for used parts instead of buying brand new things. Very rarely I had money to buy a new set there were always video games and other things that I had more need of so collecting these made no sense in my case.
Lego may not have invented it, but they perfected it
I don't feel so bad now for wanting to get some Lepin kits of Lego I can't afford like the Star Destroyers etc. :D
i’m surprised that he has most of the brick systems before modern lego
I remeber when I was in kindergarten my teacher let us play Legos on break and they had one of these old bricks
This has got to be one of the best/most important videos you've done to date. Thanks JANG.
ELGO LEGO mind blown.
call me crazy, but i love those instructions (especially red yellow and green one).. since the bricks they are using are not very complicated, they do not need a step-by-step and i think it allowed kids to be not only more creative but also develop spacial thinking and start growing them engineering skills: it is supposed to come out a certan way, and you only have guidelines on how to get there. i like it.
LEGO be like: "I was a business man doing business"
A flawless video, providing informations in a very clean and simple way, showing something that is very hard to come by. This is the only channel where you can find something like this.
Thanks the the history lesson, teacher... When is the test? 😌
I have been subscribed to your channel for about two years now and I have to say that you are, by far, the best Lego reviewer that I have seen on youtube. Its great that you also do videos like these to educate people on the history of such an iconic toy. keep up the great work
So Lego is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Nice
a Buddy of mine gave me his childhood collection of Lego recently, and buried under the bricks was a full tube of original Elgo American plastic bricks. very difficult to build things with since they have zero clutch power.
Wood Bricks.
Please do more videos like this! I thoroughly enjoyed this.