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!

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

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

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.

ELGO: exists Lego: wait that's illegal

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

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. 😂

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.

Me in 2016: This is interesting. Me now: **cries in nostalgia**

Lego be like: i was bad but now im good

I feel like I just warped into an alternate reality

The kid who said it first: Kiddicraft The kid who said it louder: Lego

I have a black fake 1x2 brick (that is the size of a system 1x2) that says "Better Blocks" and since I have some ancient Lego stuff (stage prop figures and a printed brick of the old shell logo), I'm pretty sure it's from the 70's or the 80's.

5:40 those prices almost look reasonable until you start calculating for inflation lol! Estimating 1955 for the instructions makes that No. 1 set $72 in 2021 dollars. Those deluxe sets are just mind-blowingly expensive!

The way those rubber bricks look today almost makes it look like real bricks, save for the studs. If you were to put that on a model diorama I'm sure people would be thoroughly impressed with the realistic look of the brick replica

So LEGO bricks is basically a rip-off of a spin-off that is also a rip-off of another rip-off that is a spin-off of a rip-off brand. Very interesting world we live in

Those builds with the rubber bricks at the end are so awesome

5:06 i can actually see this being a really cool lego set (in the same size as the white house perhaps?)

I’d say that the interlocking brick system is such a good and simple idea for a toy that it would eventually have been invented no matter what. So if aliens exist, they probably have lego too :)

Now I'm pretty sure the only reason why LEGO doesn't try to get a full copyright for their LEGO brick and the sue the pants off guys like Mega Bloks or Kreo is because they know that, when you really come down to it, they aren't so different from those guys.

Honestly i like old legos Using your imagination to build something You wanted starwars Boom A block as a person Thats how i played and I rarely used the figures

One question, where did you buy those old Legos from? I mean kiddicraft the other kiddicrafts ELGO the lego from 1949 and the one from the 50s mini brix bild o brick bri plax etc from where so you can buy one

Thank goodness this isn't marked for kids

I wonder what it would feel like to build with the rubber ones. Would they squeak? Be sticky? It would be really fun to try out old toys like this, but maybe recreations so the originals don't get ruined.

I remeber when I was in kindergarten my teacher let us play Legos on break and they had one of these old bricks

That was enlightening. Very, very interesting. Thank you very much for sharing this information with us!

Where did you get the ORIGINAL automatic binding brick? ive only seen it once in a picture

LEGO be like: "I was a business man doing business"

So Lego is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Nice

I wanna see someone build the build on the photo at 5:06 tbh

Whats the music?

Showed duplo, should showed lego quatro

But hey Lego is the first brick to have tubes so don't get to angry

That a load of bricks

nice

Oh wow, Halsam bricks! My mom had some of those when I was a small child in the 80s and even had a catalog from them detailing the various products they had.

Mid vid I picked up a lego and said “you lied to me” (to the brick)

All this company walk so that lego can run 👍

nice video :) I am happy to see that LEGO is rip-off too :D LoL

Kiddicraft: HEY! DONT COPY ME! lego: I’ll take a copy Kiddicraft: STOP!

I despair when people buy fake Lego bricks. And the worst thing is when they get mixed up with the real stuff.

makes me appreciate my lego bricks much more. TYCO bricks were also around in the late 80s

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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! :-)

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

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

So let me get this straight... Some crappy rubber building block sets had inverse cheese slopes but Lego doesn't.

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

So basically building bricks was a huge line of copying someone else's stuff? Nice.

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

The music at the end would come to be if Mario galaxy and Minecraft had a baby of music!

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

thanks so much for the history lesion

This is absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for this great overview!

Definetly one of my favourite videos on youtube

Crazy to think my grandparents would of played with these

Some of those designs are really good for their time

Lol, as a Dane, it was so fun seeing you not even want to try to say: "Plastic Byggeklodser"

A piece of history. Truly breath taking.

i wish Jang would teach us more then entertain and inspire. id love to hear about color histories OOH or how different piece shapes come to be, how do they decide the shape, dimensions or the ever important "connection points" on pieces

He's a fun fact you may not know, in the 1990s Lego brought kiddicraft before they copyrighted the brick and went after Tyco

That ELGO and LEGO coincidental name is just so awesome

You sir are the Lego VSauce. ;)

So your telling me that LEGO is a copy of a copy which copied some-other company which was a copy of anthor compony which copied author compony?

Maybe put them in a museum for your Lego city??

When plastic goes extinct but lego still continues to make bricks: 3:09

1:37 it was a that time that the bane of our feet’s existence was born

ITS MORE FUN TO CREATE A NEW MODEL THAN TO COPY this is what made the great generation great

Looking at those old models... really makes you appreciate how much more there is to do with Lego these days.

So many copies, so much history! Next thing you know, archeologists will find strange looking blocks in the catacombs of Africa that were able to connect together...hmm...

I have entire bucket of Kiddicraft bricks at my grandparent's house!

I was given a small set of bricks in 1947. I believe, but I'm not positive, that they were made by Meccano but were not sold under that name. The set consisted of two sizes (four pins and eight pins) and five colours (red, white, green, yellow and blue). For some inexplicable reason, all the colours except red came in both sizes. I later sent off some Christmas money and received a box containing only small red bricks. The slots in the ends were to permit a thin strip of wood (included in the set) to be threaded through to support bricks that had no bricks under them. This would make possible a bridge, for example.

I just love channels like this. Its so relaxing, both the music and your voice. I read the description too, I like the safe aspect.

"It's more fun to create a new model than it is to copy it" Ironically, thats kinda fitting for the video

The mark of a true dedicated collector is to find interest in the present but also the past of his passion centre of focus. Very nice video.

This has got to be one of the best/most important videos you've done to date. Thanks JANG.

I actually have some of those Kiddicraft bricks. I always thought they were the old Lego bricks, but now I know. I found them buried in the dirt at my old house in Iowa. I'll have to dig them up from my large collection of Lego and see if they're worth anything still.

Good thing LEGO came along, as my childhood was built (No pun intended) on pretty much nothing but LEGO.

I’m just impressed that you managed to get your hands on these.

I have been subscribed to your channel for about two years now and I have to say that you are, by far, the best Lego reviewer that I have seen on youtube. Its great that you also do videos like these to educate people on the history of such an iconic toy. keep up the great work

That was great! The idea of "show and don't tell" is brilliant.

I feel like im watching a government conspiracy

Please do more videos like this! I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Looking at these old brick sets is seriously freakin me out lol great vid 👍

ELGO LEGO mind blown.

I would love to see a video in a similar style of Lego unique parts or on the history of Lego and how they nearly went out of business

Wow. This is amazing Jang! Thanks for sharing! I would love to see more videos like this in the future

So no one can complain about knock off lego because lego is a knockoff itself. Right?

LEGO grew far more than past bricks, they have so many uniquely made models. And don't even get me started with technic pieces. And minifigures too.

The end half has such calming music, I loved it anyways.

$150.00! That would be like $500 today because prices back then were very different. No wonder they didn’t sell well😬

A flawless video, providing informations in a very clean and simple way, showing something that is very hard to come by. This is the only channel where you can find something like this.

The ABB's are just fantastically genuine and original with no tubes on the bottom. That's what Ole put in his pocket.

I actually have a 2x8 LEGO brick without holes on the bottom. Does that really mean it was build before 1958? It doesn't have that slit in it though.

I used to play with those rubber bricks back in the 70s at my grandmother's house, but they were old even then. Thanks for this.