Bricks Before LEGO

If you decide to order online, please consider using my affiliate links below. Just click, then browse or search for any product(s) you want:

As an Amazon Associate & Rakuten affiliate I may receive a small commission from sales to help keep my independent channels afloat.

All comments are moderated to maintain a safe, positive environment. Bad behavior is rejected, abusers are reported & blocked.

The opinions I express are mine and mine alone and not for sale for any price.

[JANGBRiCKS]

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!

[ryaquazaoffical]

Lego fans: “I absolutely hate mega blocks for ripping off legos classic block design”

Lego: *nervous sweating*

[------country-boy-------]

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.

[WipZedKay]

Man, people seem to forget about the 7000 B.C. clay bricks...

[littleraska]

This is very interesting! LEGO may not have invented the studded plastic brick toy, but they certainly perfected it.

[Arf]

i wouldn't mind more videos that are done in this style

[folisk]

Most memorial quote;
*IT'S MORE FUN TO CRATE A NEW MODEL THAN IT IS TO COPY*

[justgood]

Excellent video! I love great LEGO videos, but love great LEGO videos that somebody can learn from even better.

[merrik]

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

[valentinn]

In your Lego city, It would be cool if you make a museum with these inside. :)

[weepingkoopa]

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.

[minotaur]

I wouldnt be surprised if ancient Mesopotamian children were playing with clay interlocking bricks

[GraemePryce]

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! :-)

[malinkel_]

When he was flipping through the manuals he couldn’t have made it more satisfying to watch. I watched it over 10 times!

[ICrailroadprod.]

ELGO: exists
Lego: wait that's illegal

[diamondmc]

If the Minibrix was popular instead of LEGO... Then no one would ever get hurt by bricks

[niekgozer]

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. 😂

[PatriciaCross]

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.

[pixelpuppy]

wow! check out the prices on those things! $30 would have been INSANELY expensive back in the 1930s!

[emmagrove]

Just goes to show it's not who does it first but who does it best.