Lego bricks are all fun and games until you step on one—then it’s game over.

According to the Lego Group, who share some Lego facts on their website (“amaze your class with these awesome LEGO facts!”), on average, every person on the earth owns 86 Lego bricks. And even if you’ve never personally bought a set of Lego bricks, those little buggers tend to travel, so there is a chance that 86 of them have wormed their way underneath couch cushions, inside your dog, or even inside the walls of your own house (what if your contractor actually tried to build your house out of plastic? That would be cool.).

Whether or not you actually possess 86 Lego pieces, it’s at least highly likely that you’ve encountered them at some point in your life. And if you have, you just have to admit that these little building blocks are brilliant in their simplicity.

While you might have put a lot of thought into what you were going to make out of your ever-growing Lego collection, have you ever actually considered how they were made? Surprisingly, like the bricks themselves, the process is rather simple.

Petroleum: The Building Block of Building Blocks

We owe our love for Lego to Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter who began making wooden toys in 1932. A couple years into toy making, Christiansen named his company “Lego,” which comes from the first two letters of the Danish words leg godt, meaning “play well.” In 1947, Lego expanded into the production of plastic toys.

The successful Lego subculture as we know it today began when The Lego Group (as the company is now known) started manufacturing interlocking toy bricks in 1949 (yes, Lego bricks have been around longer than many non-residential buildings in the US). These “Automatic Binding Bricks” were originally manufactured from cellulose acetate.

While the modern brick design was developed and patented January 28, 1958, it took several more years to find the right material for the design, one which would provide structural capabilities and versatility.

Since 1963, Lego pieces have been manufactured from a plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which is a common thermoplastic polymer (Butadiene is a petroleum hydrocarbon).

The ABS arrives at Lego manufacturing facilities in granulated form and are stored in large silos. The average plant has 14 silos, and each can hold 33 tons of ABS granules. Basic lego elements begin as black, blue, dark grey, light grey, green, red, yellow, or white.

To make the bricks, the ABS plastic is heated to 230-310?°C (446-590°F) until it has the consistency of dough. Once heated, the plastic is injected into molds at a pressure of 25-150 tons (depending on the piece being manufactured). After about 5-10 seconds of chill time, the pieces are ejected.

The process for building Lego bricks is almost completed automated (and with that much machinery, we could only imagine the kinds of hydraulic fluids and lubricants they’re using to keep those machines and robots in tip-top shape!). From molding to packaging, the process is almost entirely handled by machines: during the packaging process, bins open and close automatically to distribute pieces into bags. A machine weighs the bags for accuracy of content, and if a bag’s weight is incorrect, an operator can replace the bag with a correct one.

And while cameras in the factory can identify when Lego pieces are backwards, and robots carry the pieces from different parts of the factory, the really creative aspects of Lego making is still left to the humans–designers are in charge of figuring out new configurations for Lego sets as well as sculpting installations in LEGOLAND.

Though the design of the Lego bricks is simple, they are also extremely precise and are manufactured within a universal system (meaning that all Lego pieces, no matter the year they were manufactured or their target age demographic, will interlock with one another). The precision with which Lego bricks are manufactured allows them to fit firmly together, yet be easily disassembled.

LEGO: Play Well

Lego bricks offer the unique opportunity where you don’t have to follow the directions to have a good time–in fact, at least half of the reason these toys are so much fun is because of the seemingly infinite possibilities they offer.

Get this–using computers, it’s been calculated that there are over 900 million different combination possibilities using only 6 regular (2X4) bricks. Can you believe it? Imagine how many combinations you could make with those 86 Lego bricks you found underneath the dust bunnies!

Want to learn more about how they are made? You can watch the whole How It’s Made video here:

Sources:

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/lego1.htm

https://education.lego.com/en-au/about-us/lego-education-worldwide/making-lego-bricks

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