Plus: The Origin of Hasbro, Atomic Toys, LEGO Bricks in Seattle, the Return of Pink Flamingos and MORE.

First, a few important announcements:

• You still have half a day left to celebrate Customer Service Week, the nationally recognized annual event. Join thousands of other companies around the world in showing your commitment to quality (and year-round) customer service.
• Pink flamingos are back. After 49 years in operation, the factory that made the kitsch lawn icons shut down a couple years ago. Now, using the original Don Featherstone molds, the pink flamingo is back and still proudly made in the United States.
• If you used Google’s homepage earlier this week, you might have noticed its logo was a bar code. This temporary change was in commemoration of the 57th anniversary of the first patent of the bar code. Granted to American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver three years after it was filed, patent number 2,612,994 was for a pattern of concentric circles, rather than the set of straight lines used today. (See Light Friday: Creative Bar Codes)
• NASA “bombed” the moon this morning.

Did You Know? Pt. I
Hasbro, one of the largest toymakers in the world, wasn’t originally a toymaker when the business first started.

In 1923, three Rhode Island brothers founded a textile remnant company known as Hassenfeld Brothers. Over the next two decades, their business gradually shifted into pencil boxes and school supplies, before beginning to make doctor and nurse kits, its first toys.

Hassenfeld Brothers’ first toy hit was Mr. Potato Head, which the company purchased from inventor George Lerner in 1952. The product was a huge success. In 1964, Hassenfeld Brothers produced the G.I. Joe toy, which they termed an “action figure,” safely assuming boys wouldn’t want to play with “dolls.”

According to Funding Universe, the company shortened its name to Hasbro Industries in 1968. In the years following, the titular bothers produced a number of iconic toy franchises — including Transformers and My Little Pony — and their company is now the largest producer of board games in the world.

BrickCon 2009 Highlights
They’re used in classrooms from preschool to the university level, to teach everything from math and language skills to science, engineering and technology principles — LEGO bricks are everywhere.

The LEGO company estimates it has sold some 400 billion LEGO blocks (now made in 53 different colors) since 1949. Around 19 billion LEGO elements are produced every year, or about 600 pieces produced per second. If all the LEGO bricks ever made were to be divided equally among a world population of 6 billion, each person would have 62 LEGO bricks, according to the manufacturer’s company profile.

Children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks, but for the past few years, LEGO aficionados of all ages have descended upon Seattle for the annual BrickCon convention.

Displaying creations that depict everything from war to zombies, BrickCon 2009 closed on Sunday after occupying its biggest space yet, the 35,000-square-foot Seattle Center Exhibition Hall.

Fast Company rounded up some of the highlights from this year’s convention. Here are a few of our favorites:

Above images credit: Flickr / Eyemage

Above images credit: Flickr / Chris Blakeley

Did You Know? Pt. II
The Slinky was invented in 1943 by Richard James, a U.S. Naval engineer stationed at the William Cramp & Sons shipyards in Philadelphia. While working to develop springs that could keep ship instruments stable in choppy waters, a torsion spring fell off his workbench. The spring did what a Slinky does: it “stepped” down and began to “walk” before re-coiling itself and standing upright.

The invention and financial success of the Slinky — due in large part to Richard’s wife Betty — is an interesting story. But the military connection of the toy doesn’t end with its inventor (who, despite his success, eventually left his company, his wife and his children to join a cult in Bolivia).

“In Vietnam, the toys worked from treetops,” Mental Floss says. “Radio operators would tie rope through the middle of the long metal spirals, then drape them over branches to create perfect radio antennas. The Slinkys were especially useful because they didn’t tangle and could be yanked down quickly when soldiers needed to run. … [M]ost radio operators wielded two for better reception.”

The Slinky has also gone aloft in the space shuttle to test the effects of zero gravity on the physical laws that govern the mechanics of springs, according to Absolute Astronomy.

A Toy More Dangerous than Klackers
During 1950-1951, A.C. Gilbert (the guy who invented the Erector Set and an Olympic gold-medal-winning pole-vaulter) marketed his U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a learning set containing three “very low-level” radioactive sources.

Image credit: Science Leads the Way

With the help of physicists at MIT, and unofficially encouraged by the U.S. government, Gilbert’s kit was meant to assist the average American’s understanding of chemistry, physics and nuclear science, according to American Memorabilia.

The kit came complete with a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, four samples of Uranium-bearing ores, a Wilson Cloud Chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a Spinthariscope (to view radioactive disintegration) and an Electroscope (to measure radioactivity), according to Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

The set also included a Dagwood comic book.

This World is Swell!
That is all.

Cheers.