Everything is Awesome

If you have ever had the misfortune to step on a Lego brick you will be aware that they are tough little things.

At that moment of searing pain and discomfort your first thought may not be one of admiration for Danish engineering and manufacturing. In stockinged feet the sensation is one of an involuntary foot massage by someone who has an intense dislike for you but has not expressed it at all until the very second of impact. In shoes or even work boots which can make short work of pebbles, debris and other detritus you are only too aware of something very strong and almost indestructible. Unwittingly kneeling on a brightly coloured plastic brick whilst crawling around tidying up after your offspring feels like the explosion of fragile cartlidge or that you have been shot.

Our house is always awash with bits of Lego and individual pieces can be found just about every day in the pile of the living room carpet, under furniture, in the folds of clothing, in the toe end of slippers and in the far corners where even the Dyson cannot reach.

I cannot fail to find this surprising and astounding given that the youngest of my children is nearly 19.

The allure of the building system is unending for young and old alike. In recent months the Lego accumulated over nearly quarter of a century in this household has been carefully sifted in the large transparent trunks in which it has been stored in the attic and sorted into its original sets, be it from small pocket money models of vehicles, free sets from McDonalds Happy Meals up to complex technical assemblies and very detailed character buildings and architectural homages to Frank Lloyd Wright and the movies featuring Indiana Jones.

The original instruction sheets were traced and acquired on E Bay and gradually the random mass of bricks began to reform into shapes which had been so familiar and joyful over the last 25 years.

Lego with an end product is good but such is the versatility of the vast array of sizes and their seemingly infinite combinations that the only restriction on what can be created is in the frailty of the mind or when it is children's bedtime.

An adult can spend as much time in a pool of Lego bricks as a child without embarassment or criticism.

I was the product of a generation brought up in a simpler time when entertainment peaked at the whittling of a wooden stick with a penknife. The only building blocks available to me were similarly made of wood and usually had the letters of the alphabet etched on their 6 sides. I did woodwork at Grammar School just missing out on the technological leap into metalwork, pottery and making shapes in polystyrene using a battery powered hot wire.

My younger brothers were by comparison so much more advanced and this was largely through their introduction to the medium of Lego.

My own three children were of the Lego-age and their creativity and spatial awareness flourished as a natural consequence.

I was allowed on occasion to participate in a Lego project whether the construction of a new purchase or in the assembly of some fantastic building or craft to travel in space, under the deepest oceans, into the darkest jungles or just into the back garden.

One of the most popular quests was to take on the challenge to form the tallest tower.

This was certainly a major task fully dependant on the very first brick pushed firmly into the flat and thin plastic base for stability and integrity.

I have often wondered just how high a Lego tower could be built from just one single base brick.

I am happy to report that some of the good people at The Open University have harnessed their minds to this pressing question. Using all of the laboratory equipment at their disposal Scientists played with a basic two by two brick and inserted it into a powerful hydraulic ram, usually a means to test materials to destruction. The idea was to exert continuous and increasing stress onto the Danish block. It was anticipated that the poor brick would explode and shatter scattering debris all around the testing facility. At an equivalent weight in excess of half an imperial ton something started to happen but rather than a violent reaction there was a bit of an anti-climax as the molecules gave up and the plastic collapsed in an almost molten blob.

The final weight recorded as the catalyst to the failure of the two by two was 432  KG.

In the knowledge of how much the sample brick weighed a simple extrapolation resulted in the fact that 432 KG was the same as a total of 375,000 similar bricks.

Stacked one on another, even if physically possible, the tower would be a massive height of 3591 metres or to assist in visualisation more than four times the height of the worlds tallest building, Burj Khalifa, fifteen times taller than Canary Wharf or twenty of the BT tower.

My children were successful in their construction project with their tower reaching the top of the living room door frame. It was a magnificent acheivement before the cataclysmic event that saw its ultimate failure as our pet dog ran through in reaction to the sound of someone ringing the bell and nudged the structure.

That was not something considered in the rather sanitised conditions of a laboratory.