LEGO may have been born in Denmark, but it has since become the unofficial building block of America. From theme parks to hit movies to the billions spent on new sets every year, our country is obsessed with LEGO. To honor this love affair between the greatest country on Earth and the greatest toy on Earth, hundreds of LEGO Master Builders have recreated some of the most famous American landmarks brick by brick. There have been LEGO Empire State Buildings, LEGO Mount Rushmores, LEGO Golden Gate Bridges and LEGO Space Needles. From sea to shining sea, if it fits within our borders, it’s probably been LEGO-fied. Of course, those recreations were just scale models. Which got us thinking … how many LEGO would it take to build an actual Empire State Building and an actual Mount Rushmore and an actual Golden Gate Bridge? For that matter, how many LEGO would it take to build the Pacific Coast and the Atlantic Coast and everything in between? How many LEGO would you need if you wanted to rebuild the entire United States brick by brick?
Simply copy and paste the code below and you can share this infographic on your site:
[fdembed]
To begin, we needed the same thing every good LEGO project starts out with: a sturdy base. After all, we couldn’t build anything if we didn’t have something to build it on top of. Using the most common LEGO brick in existence — the 4×2-peg brick with a surface area of 0.3 in2 — as our standard, we determined it would take 5.06 billion of them to cover one square mile. Since the U.S. encompasses 3.8 million square miles, we would need 19 quadrillion LEGO just to build the base. Then, if we were to factor in all the mountains and valleys in the terrain of our nation, that number shoots up to 1.52 sextillion LEGO. To further illustrate how big the number 1.52 sextillion is, LEGO has only produced 400 billion pieces since it first started in 1962. But we are just getting started.
Next, we had to break the entire country down, element by element. We learned that 61,000 square miles of road keep this country connected. That length of road could be rebuilt using 6.52 quadrillion LEGO. That’s enough LEGO bricks to build a tower from the Earth to the sun 400 times! An essential step in determining the number of LEGO needed to recreate the U.S. was to calculate just how many building structures, such as homes, office buildings, prisons, banks, hospitals and even movie theaters, comprised America. Luckily, our country is nothing if not incredibly well-documented, and along the way, we discovered some surprising statistics. Did you know there are only 226 major sports arenas currently operating in the United States? To build all those arenas, it would take 4.4 trillion LEGO. There are 616,008 different restaurants in the U.S., which would take 26 trillion delicious LEGO to construct. To arrive at our calculations, we determined the average size of each element on our list and how many LEGO it would take to create that average. For instance, it would take 29 billion LEGO to create an average skyscraper. Because there are 639 skyscrapers in the United States, it would take 18 trillion LEGO to build every single skyscraper in the country.
By applying that same methodology to every element, we were able to determine it would take a grand total of 65 quadrillion LEGO to build every man-made structure in the entire United States. Of course, this is just a rough estimate, give or take a few million little pieces. Who can say for sure how many LEGO it would take to build the entire United States? The only way to know is to get out there and start building.
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies, which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site.