Lincoln Logs and Their Slightly Famous Inventor
Lincoln Logs have been around for almost 100 years, and they’ve been a staple of toy boxes around the world. The inventor of Lincoln Logs even had a connection to a famous architect. In fact, they were related.
The famous architect in question was none other than Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who designed such iconic structures as Falling Water in Pennsylvania and the Guggenheim Museum. But there was another Wright that came up with the idea for Lincoln Logs–John Lloyd Wright, the architect’s second son.
John Lloyd was also an architect, and he worked with his father on the design of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in 1913 at the age of 24. But due to a disagreement over his salary, Frank Lloyd fired his son. After being let go, John Lloyd began making wooden toys in 1916. He made wooden, interlocking pieces from redwood that were based on the earthquake-proof design of the Imperial Hotel he and his father had worked on in Tokyo. The real building used interlocking timber beams that allowed the building to sway and protected it from damage during an earthquake.
He called his wooden toy timbers Lincoln Logs since they could be used to construct a…
