My former school in Germany used the Modulex-System to coordinate, which class to use whih room, to show the shedule of each teacher/class, etc. Around 1.300 pupils attented this school around the year 2000, the Modulex board was put up on a walls of the dispatcher's room in the late 1970's, stretching at least 6 meter (or even more). The room was simply called "Lego Land". As a pupil I had been in the interesting cabinett several times - and always wondered about the small size of the "Lego" bricks. Thanks to this wonderful documentary a looming question of my youth has been answered. All the best, Valentin Add on: In the brutalist building of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek (State library of Wurttemberg), errected in the 1970's in Stuttgart, there still is a Modulex chart, showing where different book themes can be found). Western Germany was really into the Modulex stuff, as it seemes.

Earlier this week, Phil Edwards published his video on how LEGO won over Kiddicraft and other competitors and now this. So much great LEGO content, I love this! Thanks Peter!!

I discovered that modulex existed back in the 1990s. I was at UCLA, and I had proposed making an art installation of Royce hall for the student union. They would pay some amount of money plus cost and materials for proposals for various media of art. I’m not entirely sure exactly how I found them, the Internet wasn’t really that much of a thing at the time. My original proposal was going to use regular Lego bricks. They rejected it because I wanted to use the right color bricks, and they preferred the sort of odd colors that Legos come in. But I wanted to make something that looks right. A few years later, probably in 1993, is when I discovered modulex. There was a fellow in West LA named Irving who sold them. I talk with them about it, but they were quite expensive, and since I didn’t get the project at UCLA, I didn’t buy them. Several years later in 1999 I was in a position to be able to afford them, and so I called Irving. However, Irving was no longer in the business. He had sold his company to a fellow named Irwin. That’s right, a different guy named Irwin bought the company from Irving. I basically bought all of the bricks that he had in brown, rust, beige, I think some green, and a few other colors. I must’ve had 50 boxes of various size bricks. I eventually built my Royce hall model, it took me about 16 hours, I worked almost straight through. I still have the model today. The items that I bought included plates with the cushioned base. I didn’t have any of the special window bricks, but I do believe I had some of the angle bricks, and I used many of them in the Royce Hall model. The boxes were very cleanly design, about 4“ x 8“ by an inch and a half or so? Eventually, I sold what I had remaining I think on eBay. The bricks are very high quality, they were not compatible at all with regular Legos either by the size of their connectors, or their thickness. They were just scale down versions of Lego bricks. I also recall that the lot that I bought from Irwin had the catalog of all the different kinds of things you could get. I sold that along with everything else.

I think one small detail that's fun: If you manage to get your hands on some pre-1958 LEGO bricks (those without the center posts) and they haven't gotten too brittle with age, you can actually link them directly into a brick manufactured today.

Just imagine if Modulex was resurrected, I would totally use it for the improved precision, plus they could introduce more unique compatability with modern bricks. Honestly, they could essentially introduce internal competition a bit

I'm honestly hoping this comes back. The colors are great, it's professional, it's minimalist. I'd love to sit down with a bunch of these and make some post modern architecture.

Seems like a product that would have been great for the LEGO Architecture line of models that's popular today. Also seems ripe for 3D printing.

i had a couple individual bricks i found over the years and they had "lego" on the studs and i wondered why they were tiny so i just started calling them "half-bricks" because i thought they were just rare half-sized bricks but i never held onto them and then i never found any in lots of official lego sets where they would have been useful and thought "why didn't they just use a 'half brick' here?" and it frustrated me to no end, i never realized that they wouldn't have fit because i never saw a modulex brick and a lego in the same room together

I think its insane how something as big lego could have someone like this be completely forgotten. I've never heard of this until this video.

Another "lost cousin" was the American Bricks building sets. They were made of wood, also in the 2 x 4 stud format.Unlike Lego, they were in a (roughly) 4 x 8 x 1 proportion (and 4 x 4 x 1 half bricks). They were grooved on the lateral edges to imitate smaller bricks of normal-appearing proportions. They were a muted brick-red rather than the bright, saturated colors of Legos. The studs were formed by punching small cylinders of wood upward, leaving sockets on the underside and studs on top. I had a huge set (or maybe multiple sets) in the late 1940s or early 1950s. And like Legos, they were savage on bare feet.

Green was not a brick color until at least 90's. Green was only used for base plates for grass and for trees and flower stems. I have no sets from the 60's to 1983 that has a green brick. The only exception is a translucent green used with the lighting bricks.

i've never heard of these before a few minutes ago and now i want them more than anything else in this world

The Modulex bricks should still come back in full for it was fun and creative while professional.

I had some summer jobs in a warehouse that used Modulex to organize the storage rack usage. Every tile had a number and and corresponding entry in an inventory book and storage bin/palette/box/tank/etc. Colors marked the "type" of stuff in it: loose/sealed/liquid and so on. The old man had a memory like a computer, knew exactly what and how much was where. I had to make a full inventory of all screws once because of a discrepancy between accounting and his memory. EDIT: screws not skews 😕

Fascinating, I didn't realize the company lasted so long and had its hand in so many fields. I had assumed it died out in the '70s. I remember meeting Karyn a few times as a kid going to lego conventions, and I'm glad you worked with her to tell the story of this fascinating company.

The weird proportions and connections of Legos were always a little bit confusing and annoying when I was a kid. I didn't tend to freebuild with System parts for anything other than houses buildings, and other technical type stuff. (Perhaps having a parent with a history of industrial design is to blame for that and my preference for drawing on graph paper.) While I can see how Lego probably preferred the bricks that are still made today, I feel like Modulex would have solved my little frustrations, as well averted the need for all the weird tricks that experienced builders end up using today.

Anything Peter Dibble is an instant like.

For all the years I've loved Lego, I'd never heard of Modulex. This was a hugely interesting documentary and I was about to say how the easy listening music was so spot on for the 1960s modernist style, when I got a pop up message to say the Burt Bacharach has just passed away.

You know, I always wondered if LEGO bricks could have had commercial applications, for planning out interior spaces or visualizing data. It just seemed like a natural fit, but I assumed no one ever realized that potential. The moment you started talking about what Modulex bricks were primarily used for, though, I figured out that computerized spreadsheets probably replaced them for a lot of those applications. What really surprised me is that they hung on until the mid-2000s, right until the tail end of Internet adoption. That just shows how good they were as a sort of stopgap between early 20th century methods and late 20th century PCs.

Whenever you least xpect it, whenever you most need it, a new Peter Dibble Documentary is right around the corner, and I couldnt be more enthralled by them

This is going to be brought back. I just know it. I don't know when, but the demand for this will always exist. Very cool video. I wonder how these were to mass produce. I wonder what they *feel* like. Damn LEGO, damn.

This video is AMAZING. I am about to leave the longest comment of all time because I have a lot to say! :) First, after meeting Karyn at Brickworld last summer, I actually wanted to make a documentary-style video like this too. Watching this has absolutely brightened my day because I don’t think I have the research or storytelling skills you do, so I’m very glad that this information has been packaged up nicely without losing the story. Another thing is that I’m so appreciative of the research that went into this. I knew just enough about Modulex that I could have spotted any egregious errors, but to see that you used and cited credible sources from the LEGO community is absolutely brilliant and I highly commend you for that. Fun fact that you didn’t include: did you know they sold two different types of glue? Glue A was for putting bricks together and Glue B was for attaching baseplates to other surfaces. I do have a couple questions, though. When I talked to Karyn last year, she made it seem as though the planning and signage products were new attempts to market a failing product, while your video made it seem like they were new SKUs for a brand that was doing very well (like reeses pieces vs cups). I hadn’t considered that before, and I had never done the research on that part of the story. Do you know which is closer to the truth? I know you consulted Karyn so perhaps she had new information or something. Last question: Was the LEGO group buyout of Modulex in 2015 a confirmed and public trade? From what I knew, they just kinda went silent and it became a sore point of conversation in the community that had gotten their hopes up. If you know anything else about that I’d love more info or some links where I can read about it. Again, this was a phenomenal video. Thank you so much for making this, and I will absolutely be sharing it on my own channel 😄

the scale and unit dimension aspects of these alone give me a ravenous need for a set.

Honestly, I’d never heard of these. Thought Lego was the only kind of building toy. Once again, another fantastic video Peter.

This was so interesting! Personally, I think that they could make a comeback in a big way if someone were to adapt LEGO Technic to the ModuleX form-factor. I can see makers going *nuts* over the new system.

This video makes me want to work in an office in the 1970s!

Always delighted to see a Peter Dibble vid drop. An excellent documentary maker 👍 Many thanks from Ireland..

As an engineering trainee for British Rail in the early 1980s, I was assigned to a regional project management office for a while. A Modulex representative came to demonstrate the planning system and the senior manager invited me into the meeting so I met the charming rep and got my hands on a few bricks. I recall the feature of being abe to photocopy the specially sized plates in sections was being sold heavily. The company decided not to buy in the end; I think the high price was seen as a problem, although I, as a Lego enthusist, was rather impressed! That was my only contatct with Modulex and their product line, and I soon moved on to other placements in BR.

I see that I am one of the contributors in the making of this video. Thank you! I would like to add this video to my digital Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Collectors Guide... (APPENDIX D - Modulex) which allows clickable links to KZfaq videos. Thanks for putting this together! ~ Gary Istok (LEGO Historian on Eurobricks, and Istokg on Brickset)

I learned about Modulex a few months ago when I decided to look up why Lego pieces weren’t cubic. Personally I’d love cubic pieces instead. Building sideways and integrating with Technic is very common and cubic pieces would help a ton with that.

I´m brazilian and have to say.. great music taste man! I'm a huge fan of bossa nova myself and it makes me happy that this classic genre made fans worldwide :)

Love how long and in depth this was, plus the visuals were perfect! Another incredible doc opening my eyes to a new subject!

When I saw this video in my feed, I thought it was going to be some obscure off-shoot or a company rival that didn't last long. I can't believe Modulex was such a massive thing that lasted over 40 years and yet I have never even heard of it. Fantastic video.

Hey for anyone who would have loved to build Lego with a size of Modulex, there's actually an off brand Lego out there by the name Loz who have like a middle ground, their bricks are 25% smaller than regular Lego bricks, while Modulex was 37.5% smaller than regular Lego bricks. Adding to this, if you look and search hard enough there brands with a larger varity of bricks for nanoblocks which are 50% the size of Lego bricks.

Peter, your videos never cease to amaze me with both the depth of the dive you take us all on, as well as the production quality. May you live for exactly however long you wish to. I won't curse you with immortality, but please keep up the great work for many many more years to come before you punch your ticket, alright?

I used Modulex in the 1960s in a layout for the company's stampings works producing laminations for electric motors solenoids, small transformers and similar products

I met Karen Murphy a few times at past Brickfairs, and she is wonderful! I also have additional info about the signage from an inside source. A friend of mine, Kevin Hinkle, used to work in a community outreach position at the LEGO Group in the 2010s, and showed pictures of the offices he worked at. Most employees had office signs made with printed LEGO system tiles, but the executives were still using Modulex!

Buff or Tan was introduced to the US market with the Castle System sets. Before those sets that color was not available.

I always wondered whether things would have been simpler if LEGO had gone with 1x1x1 proportions for everything as Modulex did. There are lots of hacks to make things line up with LEGO bricks, e.g. when one is vertical.

I can't be sure without seeing the box these came in but I think I actually had some of these as a kid. I was born in the 90s but my grandmother is a hoarder, and she kept toys from whenever my aunts and my mom were kids in the 60s and 70s up until today to the point where I grew up playing with original Smurf toys and toys that were from Mork and Mindy, and I specifically remember having an old box of really small really thin blocks kind of like Legos whenever I was growing up that had windows and doors with them that were meant for building little models of buildings. They were a lot smaller than any other Lego kind of blocks I've had since and I don't remember much about them other than that the packaging was blue and red and white, and I think there was an o in the design that had an arrow coming out of it, possibly with a bullseye kind of shape? Either way looking back I definitely should not have been playing with them as a kid because they were definitely choking hazards. I apologize ahead of time for any typos, I use a voice typing system because of my disabilities and it doesn't always recognize my speech properly.

Dude your uploads are always so PBS quality, you're seriously one of the best channels on youtube by a huge margin.

I’m amazed at how unknown this system is given how successful it managed to be, I had never heard of it at all until I started using bricklink and saw it listed

I'm borne 1963, and was crazy about LEGO from 2-3 years of age. My mom sayed it was very practical that she could just place my large wooden basket of lego in front of me, and she could go about household chores, just hearing me show through the basket in search for the right brick or part. (I knew exactly how many of the more unusual parts I had.) When the sound of me showing the bricks in the basket seased, she knew I had fallen asleep on the floor carpet!😄 I remember when the slanted rooftiles 2x6 knobs were introduced (so they were not exlusive to the Modulex system), a rotating disk assembly, and the first LEGO motor, that had a separate battery box, that you connected with electrical cords to the motor. A train system was also introduced. You had to assemble the rails and sleepers yourself. LEGO bricks were not only offered as kits, but rather more in white and black paper boxes containing a category of parts/bricks. Often when we travelled to town (every 1-2 weeks, by steam powered trains!), I would ask to buy a certain type of bricks. And I kept track of new types of bricks introduced. My daughter who has moved from home to university, specifically asked me to retain the wooden basket with the LEGO bricks and parts for her, when clearing amongst her toys. Who knows, perhaps my grandchildren will be playing with some of my old bricks mixed in with their new ones?😘 There was actually an Italian rip-off brick system, that my mom bought when we had vacation in Italy, because I was very unhappy I didn't have my LEGO. However, when we came home, the 3year old me, got very upset whenever these "false bricks" didn't work with the genuine LEGO, so she sorted them out, and threw them away (without me knowing), which restored my peace of mind.😆 Sadly gears where only introduced after I had learned to work even in metal for my projects.

I am in disbelief over the quality of this documentary

This channel is like a secret little club that I’m privileged to belong to. I want to tell everyone about it, but I also want to keep it just for me!

Nice video mate! I'm not a major LEGO nerd or anything, but I appreciate your storytelling.

I don't know if you know this but when I visited European Space Agency's CDF (concurrent design faciity) at ESTEC that is a room with a layout similar to a control room but meant for designing future space missions, there are consoles for each of the subsystems, 3 wall-sized interactive videowhiteboards etc and there is a little table in the first row close to the central large interactive screen that is for "modelling" in the physical sense, and for this there is a flat suface and a number of boxes containing modular contructions with generic shapes and also more specific custom parts like pole, parabolic and SAR antennas, solar panels, rocket nozzles, spherical tanks etc. When we simulated the design of a new mission (very broadly as a first phase) I was the one putting my hands on those pieces. When I did this in early 2010s those were not something I would describe as "lego type" constructions because they were based on something similar to the holes and double pins used in LEGO technic, in many cases they looked like 3dprinted. But since then I have seen a few spacecraft concepts modelled with LEGO (or something very similar) in institutional models too. so I guess the set of tools available have been expanded. Some might downplay this approach as "toy like" in a time with computer 3d modeling and 3d printing, but CAD modeling and 3D printing are very slow process, snapping a few plastic pieces together is much much faster when the configuration is constantly being modified and revised. it's a kind of tool that is hard to beat

That was an amazing mini documentary! I don't know how you can afford to create something with such scope and depth and production quality, but you nailed it! You've earned a subscriber!

I love the 1960s waiting room Jazz soundtrack. Very appropriate for obvious reasons.

I hope this comes back it's such a genius design and tool that today could be more useful than ever could have a large impact even of we have 3D modeling and computers it's still important to preserve this historic piece of art.

Wow! I can’t believe that I just watched a 30-minute KZfaq video from beginning to end… but this was absolutely FASCINATING! And very well done too - Thank you!

With the invention of 3D printers, I wonder if people are going to start creating their own MODULEX bricks? I also wonder if Architects may actually consider more nowadays and they did back then? Despite the introduction of CAD, as mentioned even back to the sixties, sometimes just having a physical model to make all the difference to being able to perceive a final design, and the simplicity to change the design is super important.

Crazy to think the Project Management System was basically just the predecessor to Microsoft Excel

This was very intriguing to watch. Thank you for the great quality!

This is the best video on here

Now I want to find some of these bricks! I need to keep my eyes out on inspecting no-so LEGO bricks in thrift stores. I do hope LEGO would revitalize the M20 line with conversion bricks to make both systems compatible with each other. But I don't see how it would make business sense. Even with the signage and stationery route, LEGO is already producing similar product lines.

I swear I might’ve come across a Modulex signboard once, thought it was a lego signboard. Cool vid man

I never know what I'm going get from Peter Dibble but I know it's going to be good!

I feel that with the amount of Lego object scaling projects there are, it's a shame and a missed opportunity that these aren't around anymore.

This was a beautifully made video, informational, entertaining, and a fun little footnote in the history of toys. Deserves way more views!

This was so cool! I had no idea this ever existed! Hearing that Modulex was used to teach city planning in schools for a while made me think of Sim City. I wonder if Will Wright ever used Modulex when he was in school. Wouldn't that be cool if this was some kind of secret inspiration? This is so neat! Thanks for this video!

Just found your channel a couple weeks ago. Always nice to have another go-to as I watch KZfaq instead of TV. Great videos.

What a great video so we’ll done! Was very excited to discover the name tags we used at our office desk was actually ModuleX. I still have mine, and all this time I thought it was just a lego knockoff brand. It’s pleasing to know its part of lego history

The teal blue oddly enough does have an unintentional color match. A lot of old blue bricks will yellow to a similar hue due to the bromide, just like grey bricks if the same era

What a great documentary. I have LEGO from since I was a kid and I never heard of Modulex.

I find it interesting how even though the "professional focused" modulex died out, lego is still being used for prototyping in plenty of professional environments. You can't kill a good idea.

This is unbelievably Underrated You deserve Hundreds of Millions of Subscribers,

I work for Modulex in Billund, proud to see this video. 😊

Peter Dibble x Lego is the crossover I needed

Quite interesting indeed. And unfortunately, an other proof that LEGO is a company and don't care about what people want, only in profits (which sometimes are the same, but far from always). Thank you for your work for this great video.

This is incredibly well put together and thoroughly enjoyable. You're gonna be a success.

I never knew this existed, thanks for a great video!

I had no idea of the timeline of LEGO. All I knew was they were around in 1960, when I was 4. Thank you Peter for another great history lesson!

This is an excellent documentary, and I just realized you're the same person who made the Kartrak documentary. You've earned a subscription from me.

Such an interesting story about a product that I have never heard of, but which is a cousin to a product which I am very familiar with! Can't wait for the next video!

Wow--another finely crafted documentary! Well done, and thank you! 🙂👍

Thanks a LOT for this amazing video/documentary.

This was so amazing! Thank you for putting this one together for us. As a fan of LEGO from childhood to adulthood, I am very grateful for your work on this.

Fascinating. Thanks for an awesome video!

Mind blown. How is it I’m just now hearing about this!

Genuinely interesting video, thanks for making this! It also has excellent production quality.

Thank you for amazing story. Definitively, in their modular builds, Architecture line and Dots line , Lego took something from ModuleX.

Gantt Charts by Lego was not a thing I knew existed.

This was a fascinating documentary. Excellent research and presentation. Thank you.

Thank you for this video. Huge Modulex fan with a very tiny collection. Huge fan of Karyn.

Another awesome well done video!! I always look forward to learning more.

Incredible production and research. Thank you!

What a fascinating story and very well presented. Thank you for sharing this with us Peter 😊

He's back!

I feel like something similar to this could work more nowadays. Plenty of people are inspired to become architects by lego, and official support for that might be nice. But a new system would probably just come across as unecesary. Maybe just an ad campaign/ product line encouraging lego to be used to make slightly off-scale models. Lego has some business use as is anyway, at least for team coordination stuff.

Thanks for making this wonderful video! 👍

This is an amazing bit of history! Thank you for putting it together!

Damn, I wish they still made these things. It kinda reminds me of the blue girder and panel building toys, that were clearly made for the more engineering-minded kids.

This was a great pleasure to watch! Having grown up with Lego, I had never heard of Modulex, but it looks fascinating, i might even try to get a few bricks 'just for the sake of it'! Thanks for this excellent production, I'll be keeping an eye on your channel ;-)

I get kind of sad whenever something that occured in the lifetime of people alive today becomes lost history.

I remember what I thought was Lego being used to create gantt charts and the like back in the late 80s and 90s… I had no idea that it was a completely separate product. Now I have a hankering to get my hands on a load of Modulex bricks. 😁

Ole died happy and confident that his company was in good hands! Bless this man and all his descendants.

My son is addicted to LEGO. He started with a couple of bricks now he does a full one of those green bases in one go 😭. It's heartbreaking stuff, tears familys apart.

I work in a hotel in Norway built in the 70s. We have a "vakt master" storage with this sign in the basement. I always thought it looked like lego, but I never expected it really is lego! I wish I could post pictures here.

If you’re lucky enough to get to build the 1:200 scale Titanic kit, it comes with a small quantity of five stud plates.