The Forgotten Story of Modulex: LEGO's Lost Cousin

Earlier this week, Phil Edwards published his video on how LEGO won over Kiddicraft and other competitors and now this. So much great LEGO content, I love this! Thanks Peter!!

My former school in Germany used the Modulex-System to coordinate, which class to use whih room, to show the shedule of each teacher/class, etc. Around 1.300 pupils attented this school around the year 2000, the Modulex board was put up on a walls of the dispatcher's room in the late 1970's, stretching at least 6 meter (or even more). The room was simply called "Lego Land". As a pupil I had been in the interesting cabinett several times - and always wondered about the small size of the "Lego" bricks. Thanks to this wonderful documentary a looming question of my youth has been answered. All the best, Valentin Add on: In the brutalist building of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek (State library of Wurttemberg), errected in the 1970's in Stuttgart, there still is a Modulex chart, showing where different book themes can be found). Western Germany was really into the Modulex stuff, as it seemes.

I think one small detail that's fun: If you manage to get your hands on some pre-1958 LEGO bricks (those without the center posts) and they haven't gotten too brittle with age, you can actually link them directly into a brick manufactured today.

I'm honestly hoping this comes back. The colors are great, it's professional, it's minimalist. I'd love to sit down with a bunch of these and make some post modern architecture.

I discovered that modulex existed back in the 1990s. I was at UCLA, and I had proposed making an art installation of Royce hall for the student union. They would pay some amount of money plus cost and materials for proposals for various media of art. I’m not entirely sure exactly how I found them, the Internet wasn’t really that much of a thing at the time. My original proposal was going to use regular Lego bricks. They rejected it because I wanted to use the right color bricks, and they preferred the sort of odd colors that Legos come in. But I wanted to make something that looks right. A few years later, probably in 1993, is when I discovered modulex. There was a fellow in West LA named Irving who sold them. I talk with them about it, but they were quite expensive, and since I didn’t get the project at UCLA, I didn’t buy them. Several years later in 1999 I was in a position to be able to afford them, and so I called Irving. However, Irving was no longer in the business. He had sold his company to a fellow named Irwin. That’s right, a different guy named Irwin bought the company from Irving. I basically bought all of the bricks that he had in brown, rust, beige, I think some green, and a few other colors. I must’ve had 50 boxes of various size bricks. I eventually built my Royce hall model, it took me about 16 hours, I worked almost straight through. I still have the model today. The items that I bought included plates with the cushioned base. I didn’t have any of the special window bricks, but I do believe I had some of the angle bricks, and I used many of them in the Royce Hall model. The boxes were very cleanly design, about 4“ x 8“ by an inch and a half or so? Eventually, I sold what I had remaining I think on eBay. The bricks are very high quality, they were not compatible at all with regular Legos either by the size of their connectors, or their thickness. They were just scale down versions of Lego bricks. I also recall that the lot that I bought from Irwin had the catalog of all the different kinds of things you could get. I sold that along with everything else.

Just imagine if Modulex was resurrected, I would totally use it for the improved precision, plus they could introduce more unique compatability with modern bricks. Honestly, they could essentially introduce internal competition a bit

I think its insane how something as big lego could have someone like this be completely forgotten. I've never heard of this until this video.

i had a couple individual bricks i found over the years and they had "lego" on the studs and i wondered why they were tiny so i just started calling them "half-bricks" because i thought they were just rare half-sized bricks but i never held onto them and then i never found any in lots of official lego sets where they would have been useful and thought "why didn't they just use a 'half brick' here?" and it frustrated me to no end, i never realized that they wouldn't have fit because i never saw a modulex brick and a lego in the same room together

Another "lost cousin" was the American Bricks building sets. They were made of wood, also in the 2 x 4 stud format.Unlike Lego, they were in a (roughly) 4 x 8 x 1 proportion (and 4 x 4 x 1 half bricks). They were grooved on the lateral edges to imitate smaller bricks of normal-appearing proportions. They were a muted brick-red rather than the bright, saturated colors of Legos. The studs were formed by punching small cylinders of wood upward, leaving sockets on the underside and studs on top. I had a huge set (or maybe multiple sets) in the late 1940s or early 1950s. And like Legos, they were savage on bare feet.

Seems like a product that would have been great for the LEGO Architecture line of models that's popular today. Also seems ripe for 3D printing.

Green was not a brick color until at least 90's. Green was only used for base plates for grass and for trees and flower stems. I have no sets from the 60's to 1983 that has a green brick. The only exception is a translucent green used with the lighting bricks.

Fascinating, I didn't realize the company lasted so long and had its hand in so many fields. I had assumed it died out in the '70s. I remember meeting Karyn a few times as a kid going to lego conventions, and I'm glad you worked with her to tell the story of this fascinating company.

i've never heard of these before a few minutes ago and now i want them more than anything else in this world

The Modulex bricks should still come back in full for it was fun and creative while professional.

Anything Peter Dibble is an instant like.

I had some summer jobs in a warehouse that used Modulex to organize the storage rack usage. Every tile had a number and and corresponding entry in an inventory book and storage bin/palette/box/tank/etc. Colors marked the "type" of stuff in it: loose/sealed/liquid and so on. The old man had a memory like a computer, knew exactly what and how much was where. I had to make a full inventory of all screws once because of a discrepancy between accounting and his memory. EDIT: screws not skews 😕

You know, I always wondered if LEGO bricks could have had commercial applications, for planning out interior spaces or visualizing data. It just seemed like a natural fit, but I assumed no one ever realized that potential. The moment you started talking about what Modulex bricks were primarily used for, though, I figured out that computerized spreadsheets probably replaced them for a lot of those applications. What really surprised me is that they hung on until the mid-2000s, right until the tail end of Internet adoption. That just shows how good they were as a sort of stopgap between early 20th century methods and late 20th century PCs.

For all the years I've loved Lego, I'd never heard of Modulex. This was a hugely interesting documentary and I was about to say how the easy listening music was so spot on for the 1960s modernist style, when I got a pop up message to say the Burt Bacharach has just passed away.

This video is AMAZING. I am about to leave the longest comment of all time because I have a lot to say! :) First, after meeting Karyn at Brickworld last summer, I actually wanted to make a documentary-style video like this too. Watching this has absolutely brightened my day because I don’t think I have the research or storytelling skills you do, so I’m very glad that this information has been packaged up nicely without losing the story. Another thing is that I’m so appreciative of the research that went into this. I knew just enough about Modulex that I could have spotted any egregious errors, but to see that you used and cited credible sources from the LEGO community is absolutely brilliant and I highly commend you for that. Fun fact that you didn’t include: did you know they sold two different types of glue? Glue A was for putting bricks together and Glue B was for attaching baseplates to other surfaces. I do have a couple questions, though. When I talked to Karyn last year, she made it seem as though the planning and signage products were new attempts to market a failing product, while your video made it seem like they were new SKUs for a brand that was doing very well (like reeses pieces vs cups). I hadn’t considered that before, and I had never done the research on that part of the story. Do you know which is closer to the truth? I know you consulted Karyn so perhaps she had new information or something. Last question: Was the LEGO group buyout of Modulex in 2015 a confirmed and public trade? From what I knew, they just kinda went silent and it became a sore point of conversation in the community that had gotten their hopes up. If you know anything else about that I’d love more info or some links where I can read about it. Again, this was a phenomenal video. Thank you so much for making this, and I will absolutely be sharing it on my own channel 😄

Whenever you least xpect it, whenever you most need it, a new Peter Dibble Documentary is right around the corner, and I couldnt be more enthralled by them