First Lego set

[mmcirvin]

John Scalzi recently gave his daughter Athena her first Lego bricks, at the age of 9. (Some commenters described this delay as abuse, but somehow she doesn't seem like an unhappy kid to me.) Jorie's nearly 2 and it seems high time to get her some Duplos (her cousin Greta is fond of them). So I was thinking about this and trying to track down the identity of my first Lego set.

It wasn't that hard. I'm pretty sure it was this spartan, Samsonite-produced set from their early 1970s line. I remember the baseplates as being not the standard ones listed there, but a flimsier version with no tubes on the bottom (which broke in short order—I had half of one in my collection for some time, and occasionally found it useful); this may have been a pre-1973 variant. Not long after, I got one of the slightly more complex Samsonite sets with wheels and gears, but I'm not sure which one it was.

Reading up on this clears up a few mysteries. I always thought that Lego sets rapidly evolved from these very basic kits to much more complex ones in the mid-1970s, until I saw scans from the Sixties of kits that had pieces I thought only appeared much later. This seems to have been the fault of Samsonite; they weren't just the US distributor, they were actually producing original Lego sets under license for the North American market. For a while they seem to have done all right in this capacity—they were even the first to market gears, in somewhat different form from the proto-Technic ones that came out in Europe—but in the early 1970s, for some reason their Lego product line abruptly shrank to these very basic sets. Not long after that, they lost their license and Lego proper started a US division in Connecticut, leading to the apparent explosion of variety that I remember.

So I just happened to start playing with Lego bricks at the absolute nadir of Lego production in the United States. That they had considerable appeal anyway is a testament to the strength of the basic idea.

Update: Aha—the abrupt retail shrinkage seems to have been the result of Lego suing to terminate the agreement. Apparently Samsonite was selling huge catalog sets at the same time to liquidate their inventory!

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, I have clear memories of this booklet (http://brickfetish.com/catalogs/us/us_1970.html) with the big red X over the WRONG way to make a wall.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

We had Lego too, but we seemed to have more invested in Construx, which was all girders and joints. And I played with Construx a lot more.

I don't know why.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the Construx sets appeared a little later, so I never got into them at an early age. The main problem with Lego was that the sets of significant size were and are pretty expensive; to have a humongous number of them was a sign of privilege. Competitors made cheaper, sometimes compatible blocks that might be good for rounding out sets with the basic brick shapes, but they were frowned upon by snobby kid society. I had almost all of the early space-themed sets of the late Seventies but wasn't that much of a completist otherwise.

I did play with Tinkertoys a lot early on, but the possibilities there are less varied than with Lego bricks, though Tinkertoys have the advantage that it's easy to make something really huge.

And I had an Erector set too, but I insisted on using the stupid useless little tools that came with the set, so it was hard to build anything.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Wow, apparently Construx were only on the market for a few years in the 1980s (aside from an even briefer revival in the late 1990s)! I did not know that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Oh, I'm getting them mixed up with K'Nex, which I never had either.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

I had Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys, but my parents wouldn't ever get me any Lego. I was in college before I owned Lego. Sigh.