LEGO and ELGO: The Uncanny Coincidence of Two Building-Block Empires LEGO and ELGO were two companies that independently invented interlocking plastic building bricks, started with wooden toys, rebuilt after factory fires, and named themselves with nearly identical four-letter founder-derived brands—an echo of other “multiple discovery” moments in invention history. The names alone feel like a riddle. One company took “Leg godt” (“play well” in Danish) and compressed it into LEGO. The other took Elliott and Goss and compressed them into ELGO. Two toy makers on different continents, with no known contact, arrived at the same idea and almost the same word. Chicago’s Hal + Sam In 1917, brothers-in-law Harold “Hal” Elliott and Samuel “Sam” Goss Jr. launched Halsam Products in Chicago. They simply glued their first names together: HAL + SAM. The company began with wooden alphabet blocks, dominoes, and checkers, using techniques borrowed from the Goss family’s printing-press business. By the late 1930s they had patented interlocking wooden “American Bricks.” In 1928 a fire fueled by wood, sawdust, and celluloid destroyed their Ravenswood factory; they rebuilt larger. In 1941 they created a plastics division and again used their names: EL from Elliott + GO from Goss = ELGO. After wartime delays, ELGO’s American Plastic Bricks reached stores in 1947. The bricks used studs and sockets but had weaker “clutch” than later LEGO pieces, so builders often had to think about gravity and structure rather than snap-and-forget. Billund’s “Play Well” Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter in Billund, Denmark, began making wooden toys in 1932 after earlier workshop disasters. In 1934 he named the company LEGO from “leg godt.” A major factory fire in 1942 again wiped out much of the operation; he rebuilt. In 1949 LEGO introduced Automatic Binding Bricks, plastic pieces inspired in part by British Kiddicraft designs. The famous stud-and-tube clutch system that made bricks stay together arrived later. LEGO did not enter the U.S. market until 1961. The list of parallels The overlap is not just one coincidence. It is a cluster: - Both began as wooden-toy makers (Halsam 1917, LEGO 1932) producing simple, sturdy playthings for children. - Both suffered factory fires and rebuilt (Halsam 1928; LEGO notably in 1942, plus earlier and later blazes). - Both moved into injection-molded plastic bricks in the 1940s—ELGO commercially in 1947, LEGO in 1949. - Both named the company by combining or shortening founder-related words into a short, punchy four-letter brand. - Neither appears to have known the other existed when the plastic bricks launched. - When LEGO later prepared to sell in America, the name similarity was obvious enough that the companies talked; accounts describe a modest payment so LEGO could proceed without trademark friction. ELGO bricks looked like miniature masonry and often came in distinctive metal canisters. LEGO’s first plastic bricks were simpler and hollow underneath until the tube system arrived. Names that feel like a shared invention History is full of simultaneous or near-simultaneous inventions: Newton and Leibniz on calculus, several inventors circling the telephone and incandescent lamp, Wallace and Darwin on evolution. Those cases usually involve the same scientific problem in the air at the same time. Here the “problem” was how to let children stack small units into houses and towers after wood and then plastic became available. What makes this pair strange is the branding. “Halsam” and “Elgo” were deliberate portmanteaus of the same two men’s names. “Lego” was a Danish slogan reduced to four letters. The resulting words sit one letter apart and sound almost interchangeable. That is rarer than two people inventing a similar widget. It is closer to two people independently inventing the same catchy product name. 1 of 2