Kiddicraft

"When the war ended, it was challenging to obtain wood from Sweden for production, so Ole Kirk was in search of new raw materials. In 1947, a representative from Windsor, a machine factory in England, visited Copenhagen to demonstrate a plastic injection moulding machine. He spoke about the advantages of a new material—plastic—and carried with him plastic bricks from the English company Kiddicraft, which he suggested as a possibility to all the gathered potential customers."

"Ole Kirk Kristiansen decided to put the blocks into production. The blocks were slightly adjusted—the thickness was changed, and the studs were flattened, but otherwise, they were like Kiddicraft’s blocks. That same year, LEGO entered the market with the so-called Automatic Binding Bricks—it was popular to have English names for toys back then—and sold them, as Kiddicraft did, in a cardboard box with pictures showing what children could build with them."

"The blocks were developed by the Englishman Hilary Fisher Page, who founded the toy company Kiddicraft in 1932. The plastic blocks were square with studs on top and hollow inside, allowing them to be assembled much better than the old wooden blocks. They could be used to build houses, for example. The blocks came in several bright, strong colors and had a smooth surface that dirt didn’t easily stick to, making them easy to wash—hygiene had become a popular concept in child-rearing."

"At the end of the 1950s, LEGO contacted Kiddicraft and asked if they had any objections to the LEGO brick. Kiddicraft did not—on the contrary, they wished LEGO good luck since the Kiddicraft bricks had not been a sales success for them. Later, in 1981, LEGO bought the rights to the Kiddicraft bricks from Hilary Fisher Page’s family."