Today, January 28, Lego is celebrating its 50th
anniversary and on this occasion Google has redesigned its logo and has posted
a Lego version of the Google logo on Google.com. Larry Page and Sergey Brin,
Google founders, have meant to express their respect for Lego, by posting a
special logo on its 50th anniversary. "Larry and Sergey, Google's
co-founders, used Lego bricks as low-cost hard disk drive enclosures in the
early days so it's something that's close to our heart as a company," said
the company’s spokesman.
Last year, Google was offered the
Outreach award by Lego, as recognition for Google’s contribution to the
promotion of science, education and technology among children.
According to Search Engine
Land, “Google’s culture
has always had a special place for Lego.
Google’s first servers were ‘modded’ up with legos.”
Google declared that they will
not place advertising on their homepage, and consequently the Danish company
doesn’t have to pay for this new design, saying that this is part of their
tradition involving the creation of “"special designs for quirky
anniversaries".
Lego bricks have been used for
creating the new design of the Google logo.
Lego was first made out of wood
by a Danish carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen, in 1932. It comes from the Danish
“leg godt", which means "play well,” according to Time Magazine. In
1947 the manufacturers started using plastic to make the bricks, for whose
manufacturing they had to be very precise.
Nowadays the annual production of
Lego is of 20 billion pieces per year, or 6000 pieces per second. Averagely,
there are 62 Lego pieces for each person on the planet.
There are about 2,200 different
elements in the LEGO range – plus 55 different LEGO colours. Each element may
be sold in a wide variety of different colours and decorations,
bringing the total number of
active combinations to more than 6,000. Six 2×4 Lego bricks of the same color
can be combined in 915,103,765 ways, and just three bricks of the same color
provide 1,560 combinations.
In 1998, the Lego Group announced
an exclusive licensing agreement with Lucasfilm Ltd. It gave the company the
right to develop, manufacture and market a new series of Lego sets based on
themes from the original Star Wars trilogy and the three new Star Wars movies.