Creativity, brick by brick

Lego is not just a toy for children, it can help build some amazing things

There was news recently of Shubham Banerjee, a 13-year-old in Santa Clara, California, creating a Braille printer using Lego bricks and gears. The EV3 kit (available in India for around Rs 36,000) that he used is the third generation of the Mindstorms package that the Danish company has marketed since 1999. This kit differs from other basic construction packages in that it allows Bluetooth connectivity and includes sensors for touch, light and sound waves. The inclusion of Bluetooth gives objects the capability of wireless communication, and facilitates downloading of software. Being compatible with software used in Windows and Mac computers, has been used to fabricate interesting devices like robots that solve a Rubik's cube or convert conventional toilets into robotically flushed conveniences.

Lego, which opened shop in 1949, provides bricks and accessories that interlock to form objects. The company reportedly produces 19 billion Lego elements every year, with 2.16 million bricks being moulded every hour. In the 65 years of its existence, the company has sold around 600 billion Lego parts.

Over the years, creative minds have put Lego to more uses than to make toy cars and aircraft. At the University of Bristol, David Gauntlett uses Lego to help PhD students reflect on their research, communicate ideas and collaborate on projects. NASA has used Lego to study construction in zero-gravity, and artists like Nathan Sawaya and Sean Kenney create sculptures out of the plastic bricks. Often, architects and scientists have depended on the lightweight configuration of Lego structures to enable exploratory experiments whose results they have later transferred to real materials. Duncan Titmarsh, who works with Lego on new ways to use the construction toy, has even made a map of the London Underground with the plastic parts.

Here are some startling, and fully working, stuff created using the multi-coloured plastic bricks.

• In 2009, Top Gear presenter James May built a full-size house that had a working toilet, hot shower and a a big, hard bed. He used 3.3 million Lego bricks for the project. It was later demolished because the wine estate on which it was built needed the space to grow grapes.
   
• According to thevinylfactory.com, a website that keeps track of all things musical on a vinyl disc, a Korean Lego enthusiast, only known by his first name of Hayarobi, constructed a working turntable using over 2,400 pieces of the miniature construction toys. The record player has incorporated a traditional phono cartridge in a structure that is built entirely of Lego parts, including mini Lego car tyres as the counterweight on the tone arm.
  

 

Smithsonian.com featured an amazing practical prototype of an air-powered Lego car created by Romanian Raul Oaida in collaboration with Australian entrepreneur Steve Sammartino. He used more than 500,000 yellow and black Lego pieces to create a car that reaches a speed of up to 27 kmph. The EV3 creation uses compressed air to power the engine.
 

A German veterinarian, Carsten Plischke, was confronted with a Greek tortoise that couldn't walk properly. The good doctor found that Blade, the tortoise, had a metabolic bone disease that made him unable to carry his own shell. His solution: a Lego wheelchair consisting of six pieces, including four tyres that provide easy mobility to the little chelonian.

 

It's not simply entertaining toys that Lego has been used for. At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, engineers have used Lego to build a balance that determines Planck's Constant with scientific precision, thus helping to quantify the international standard unit of mass. The engineers opted for Lego because conventional construction methods are time-consuming and costly.