Kiddicraft

Kiddicraft was a toy company founded in 1932 by Hilary 'Harry' Fisher Page (1904–1957) at Purley in southern England. The company is notable for the predecessor of Lego bricks, the Self-locking Bricks.

Fisher Page was a pioneer in the use of plastics to manufacture toys. In 1939 Hilary Page applied for a patent for 'Toy Building Blocks' - it was a building toy based on traditional wooden cubes but made out of plastic and more with a hollow interior and four studs on the top. Studs were not a new invention because some building toys like rubber made Minibrix already used it, but Page had the intuition to reverse the position of studs from the bottom to the top of the block. In the subsequent patents he described smaller hollow bricks with 4 and 8 studs on top. These 'Self Locking Bricks' were manufactured as a Hilary Page 'Sensible' Toy, beginning from 1946.

At the end of the 1940s some European toy companies began to produce their own version of Self-locking Bricks. Swedish GEAS Konstharts, Danish Lego and Norway Svein Stromberg's PRIMA created a slightly modified version of the toy, calling it Automatic Binding Bricks. Lego reprised the design of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample given to them by the British supplier of the first injection moulding machine they had purchased. Page was never aware of this, and his daughter has stated that she "was relieved that my father never knew about Lego before he died.” Lego eventually acquired the rights to Kiddicraft in 1981 prior to beginning litigation against Tyco.

In 1999, Kiddicraft was acquired by Fisher-Price Inc. and its toy line was merged into the Fisher-Price line.

Source: http://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Home/History

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