LEGO® has been around for over 50 years! Using a near-complete database, I’ve created two simple time series. The first shows the number of pieces in each set, along with the annual average and median. Note that the y-axis is a log scale. The two largest sets (most pieces) are labeled; they are the only sets in the database with more than 5000 pieces. The second graph displays the number of sets containing at least one piece by year. The data were scraped at the beginning of May, so the 2015 bin represents only four months.

Data source: http://brickset.com/sets/query-45