In 1997 a wave swept shipping containers off a cargo ship near Cornwall, and decades later the Lego bricks inside are still washing ashore fully intact. That haunting image opens our deep dive into the Christiansen family, starting with Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter making wooden pull toys during the Great Depression, whose motto was that only the best is good enough. We then confront the contradiction at the heart of the company: its most iconic design was carefully copied from a British inventor named Hilary Fisher Page.

We explain how localized patent law let Lego produce the self-locking brick without consequences until a 1981 settlement, how Godtfred Kirk Christiansen's 1958 patent added inner tubes to create clutch power, and why the 1963 switch to ABS plastic made a brick from that era compatible with one made today. From ...