An Epic Lego Creation: A Boy's Titanic Dream Comes True

When he was just three years old, Brinjarr Carl Bjorgisson from Iceland stopped speaking and became a very unhappy child.

His parents sought ways to help him and introduced him to the world of Lego, which eventually became his lifeline to the world. "Suddenly, I became a different child and couldn’t express all the things I wanted to say. All the words I learned vanished into a fog, and I went from being a happy child to a miserable and lonely one," Carl shared recently in an interview after gaining fame. "I felt trapped in my own fog, unable to form words into sentences."

At the age of five, his parents took him to a specialist who diagnosed him with autism.

"He had to learn at school through pictures, not words," his mother recalls. "It was a very difficult time for him and for us, but then he discovered a picture of the Titanic."

And that's where the transformation happened.

Carl fell in love with the image of the sunken ship, and by the age of 10, he knew everything there was to know about the Titanic and its story. "I learned a lot about ships, and the bigger they were, the more I loved to explore and know about them."

But exploration and learning weren't enough. Carl decided to build a giant model of the Titanic from Lego, and with the help of his grandfather—who taught him how to look at the ship's original blueprints—Carl turned the impossible into possible.

How did an 11-year-old manage to build a huge model made of 560,000 Lego pieces? "We did it through crowdfunding," his grandfather explains. "We raised money just to buy the Lego pieces."

Though it took 11 months and 700 hours to build his dream ship, which measures six and a half meters long, it was worth it. "My family helped me to believe in my abilities and never to give up on my dreams. I'm glad we finally succeeded," Carl concludes.