One of the great things about being an American living in Europe is the chance to see a lot of places you’ve never been to before without having to fly across an ocean to get there. I recently got back from a road trip with my family to see a few places and one of those stops was to Munich, Germany or München as it translates into German. While there, my family stopped at the Deutsches Museum to walk around. It was an interesting museum that had enough to keep my kiddos interested and it had some English translations too for those of us who can’t speak German.
One of the sections of the Museum was the Technical Toys area. As expected it included LEGO. The picture here is Godtfred Kirk Christiansen who was the third child of Ole Kirk Kristiansen. He was also the managing director of the LEGO Group for many years. You can read more about him on the LEGO website here. According to the museum exhibit and Google Translate it says that he was the “inventor of Lego-plastic construction kits.”
The LEGO article has some information I had never heard of. The “10 Lego Characteristics” are spot on. I definitely think they met their goal. Good thing they decided to go away from wooden toys. Otherwise, where would we be?
The museum display had some bricks placed in some fun designs, but more importantly it had some of the boxes from the very first LEGO System sets. Even better, some of the boxes are in German. The box towards the upper right corner says “System im Spiel.” Google Translate says it means “system in the game,” but a spielplatz is a playground so I’m pretty sure it is system of play or something similar.
I think the museum could use some AFOLs to help beef up the displays they have. While the designs are good, they could use some new designs. Maybe some German architecture?
It was hard to get good pictures of the boxes from behind the glass display case, but here is one of the boxes. I looked it up on Brickset and I think it is 311-4: Airplanes from 1961. Am I right? Maybe some LEGO history experts can help me out here.
Interestingly enough right next to the LEGO display was IDEMA. I took some pictures because I wasn’t familiar with this toy at all and I couldn’t read the German next to the display. The best I could find was a website from Portugal that says it was a German building toy started post World War II made of Bakelite. I had to look Bakelite up as well… it’s a kind of plastic. Anyways, IDEMA did not catch on and ended up fading away in the 1970s. Looks like part of the reason it didn’t catch on was competition from LEGO. Hard to say as I couldn’t find a lot of info on it. Here are a few pictures to include a mug shot of its German inventor Josef Dehm. Here is the website I found which looks like it is Portuguese. The site has a good picture comparison picture between IDEMA bricks and LEGO bricks. You’ll also notice a a version of London’s Tower Bridge which isn’t quite as detailed as set 10214-1, but still is pretty impressive.
And finally a Ferris Wheel along with a few other builds out of this toy. Interesting stuff. I had never heard of IDEMA before. It might be that the toy didn’t make it out of Europe so we never saw it in the States. I don’t know. If you’re in Munich and you have some free time, check the Deutsches Museum out.
