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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

This is yet another story that shows a complete disregard for the crime that lies at the heart of the Lego empire: the original design for the bricks was taken from a company called Kiddicraft, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddicraft

And for an encore, Lego only acquired the Kiddicraft assets to wipe out this 'inconvenient truth' before suing another company for patent infringement.

Lego is a great toy, but any story about the origin of the bricks should at least reference the true origins of the brick rather than the Lego white-washed version.

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What bothers me more is having started their business this way, they are heavily litigious to companies that make products compatible or similar to Lego. Its good to see they generally lose these cases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone

It was a very direct and blatant rip off too. See [0]. Lego completely redesigned what they were intending to produce after seeing Page's product.

Page committed suicide after the business failed in the 50s.

[0] http://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875...

Wow, I had no idea. That's very disappointing.

> Page was never aware of this, and his daughter has stated that she "was relieved that my father never knew about Lego before he died.”

This leaves me with a different impression of the circumstances surrounding his death than the initial one I got from your comment, however.

Yes, I could have put that more clearly. Kiddicraft were like a UK Fisher Price of the 40s and 50s - they produced a massive range of toys, not just bricks. I think they failed and resurrected a couple of times with new owners keeping the brand name around.

My grandfather made some coloured injection-moulded bricks for his children before Lego but didn't bother to patent the design.

We still have some of them in the family.

That is extremely interesting. Do you have any pictures and do you know exactly when this all happened?

The blocks were made from polyethylene [1], the history section of the wiki page states that it was reserved for use in RADAR sets during WWII, this would have been how he got access to it as he was responsible for the design and manufacture of the British RADAR transmitters. I have been told that he was the first person to try putting colouring into LDPE.

This may have been after the Page design though, my mother was the eldest child but wasn't born until 1941.

I think we contributed some pictures to the UK Materials engineering society, will ask.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene

Thank you. The early history of the brick is a favorite subject of mine and there are a lot of details that are lost or about to be lost and to recover some of it is very special.

> but any story about the origin of the bricks should...

I see where you're coming from, but in this case the origin is there only to frame what the article is really about: the engineering challenge for the future of the bricks.

Going into the whitewashed origins of the Lego concept would distract from what the article is about.

I disagree with that. Every time the whitewashed story is repeated the real one is forgotten a little bit more. The article is about Lego bricks, tries to use the brick and its history to frame the story, if you're going to do that I think it should be historically accurate. That would not distract from what the article is about at all, and if it was a distraction then so is the story the way it is written right now, they could have simply omitted that part.

There were lot's of similar companies at that time. This is a silly thing to get upset about.

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