Set 926-1, ‘The Space Command Centre’ is the most valuable LEGO set, currently valued at $10,141. Released in 2013, the ‘Mr. Gold’ Minifigure has seen the highest appreciation of any LEGO set, increasing from its retail price of $2.99 to now being valued at $4,680.

1950s from Danish leg godt ‘play well’, from lege ‘to play’.

1. LEGO set – (trademark) a child’s plastic construction set for making mechanical models. LEGO. plaything, toy – an artifact designed to be played with. trademark – a formally registered symbol identifying the manufacturer or distributor of a product.

A single Lego brick is practically useless, so even at $0.12 it’s highly overrated. Two of them cost $0.24, but now you can start to combine them into unique forms. Not very many unique forms, mind you, so still pretty overrated. The quality of Lego comes from quantity, to some degree.

The perception of high cost in the range of construction toys is countered by the fact that LEGO branded bricks still work after many years, whereas some of the cheap clones last for only three tries. The latter would disappoint a child or adult builder so they are the waste of money.

The plastic used in Lego – a type of polymer called ‘acrylonitrile butadiene styrene’ (ABS) – is surprisingly strong. In fact, it’s able to withstand compression better than concrete. ‘Insulated concrete formwork’ (ICF) uses hollow polystyrene blocks that are assembled into walls and then pumped full of concrete.

“Lego bricks from the ’70s and ’80s are the big fail,” Andrew Turner, the study’s lead researcher, told the BBC. They tested for arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, mercury, lead, antimony, selenium and bromine.

The compressive strength is typically between 100 and 120 MPa, which is 3–5 times stronger than ordinary concrete.

If you divide that by the mass of a single brick, which is 1.152g, then you get the grand total of bricks a single piece of Lego could support: 375,000. So, 375,000 bricks towering 3.5km (2.17 miles) high is what it would take to break a Lego brick.

A research team working with the BBC has determined it would take 375,000 individual Lego bricks to crush the unlucky one on the bottom. That would mean a Lego tower 2.2 miles tall—or nearly 2,000 feet higher than Mount Olympus.

In fact, according to Fatherly editorial director Micah Abrams, “a single Lego can bear up to 4,240 Newtons of force, or weights in excess of 953 pounds, before it starts to deform.” Children play at Lego Village.

After the ram was activated, the 2×2 brick managed to withstand an astonishing amount of force, finally giving in at 4,240 newtons, the equivalent of 950 pounds. To build a structure big enough out of legos to exert that kind of force onto the blocks, you’d have to stack 375,000 other bricks on top of it.

Even though it hurts, you can’t deny that Legos are basically indestructible. Legos can withstand countless hours of being stacked on top of each other, only to be ripped apart in a child-like frenzy. They survive being thrown into giant bins and dumped out. They survive being stepped on.

1.152g