Wacky Facts

LEGO is from “leg godt”, Danish for “play well”. The company made wooden toys before plastic bricks arrived in 1949.

The script logo was written in Spencerian script, a popular business handwriting of the 1880s, by bookkeeper Frank Mason Robinson.

Ganga Bishan Agarwal, nicknamed Haldiram, opened a shop selling bhujia in Bikaner in 1937. The brand now sells across the world.

The brand name comes from the cooperative that started it in Anand, Gujarat in 1946. “Amulya” also means priceless in Sanskrit.

On 26 June 1974 a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum was the first item scanned at a supermarket checkout in Ohio, USA.

Tata Steel’s works began in 1907 at Sakchi, a village in Jharkhand’s forests. The town that grew around it was renamed Jamshedpur after Jamsetji Tata.

Parle Gluco biscuits launched in 1939; the name became Parle-G in the 1980s. The company later said G also means Genius.

In 1981 N. R. Narayana Murthy began Infosys with six colleagues; the seed money came from Sudha Murty’s savings.

Pharmacist Caleb Bradham sold it as Brad’s Drink in 1893 and renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898, possibly after the digestive enzyme pepsin.

Inventor Joseph Woodland got the idea in 1948 by stretching Morse code dots and dashes into lines while drawing in beach sand.

Sakichi Toyoda built automatic weaving looms. His son started the car division in the 1930s using money from selling loom patents.

Samsung was founded in 1938 in Daegu as a trading company exporting dried fish, vegetables and noodles. Electronics came three decades later.

Before video games Nintendo, founded in 1889 to make playing cards, tried taxis, a love-hotel chain and instant rice in the 1960s.

I and K for Ingvar Kamprad, E for Elmtaryd (his family farm) and A for Agunnaryd (his village in Sweden). He founded it at 17 in 1943.