LEGO began as a line of wooden toys after a fire destroyed the founder's original carpentry workshop.

The LEGO Group's history is rooted in the resilience of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a master carpenter from Billund, Denmark. In 1924, his sons accidentally set fire to a pile of wood shavings, which burned down his entire workshop and family home. Despite this setback, Christiansen rebuilt a larger workshop, but the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 caused the market for expensive furniture and houses to collapse.To survive the economic downturn, Christiansen began producing small, affordable household items like ironing boards and ladders before focusing exclusively on toys in 1932. One of his most famous early products was a wooden pull-along duck with a moving beak. In 1934, he coined the name LEGO by combining the Danish words 'Leg Godt', which translates to 'Play Well'.The transition to plastic only began after World War II when Christiansen purchased a British-made Windsor SH plastic injection molding machine in 1947. This machine cost 30,000 Danish Krone, which was more than twice the company's profits from the previous year. By 1949, the company released 'Automatic Binding Bricks', the precursor to the modern LEGO brick. These early plastic blocks were inspired by 'Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks' designed by Hilary Fisher Page in the United Kingdom.