Hilary Fisher, and not Ole Kirk Christiansen should get the credit for the brick.
http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Ima...
Pretty sure there's a little more of the tale on the site.
I have a bit of a thing against Lego's popularity given how litigious they are, and how they themselves got started.
As a 70s kid I played with my father's Bayko sets and what I think may have been American Plastic Bricks (maybe with a different name) that were in a big box at my grandma's house. These products did specialised pieces years before Lego though you were restricted to building houses.
There were plenty of others along the same lines that were building, house building or brick toys, but none had the self-assembly of the gripping pegs in the plastic bricks that became the Kiddicraft innovation, later copied by Lego. Earlier sets used, like Bayko, different materials and approaches to assembly and go back into the inter-war years, perhaps even pre-WW1.
Kiddicraft and Lego stem from injection moulding.
Sounds like this wasn't wholly related to LEGO, if it all.
Like any good idea, invention is not even half of the battle -- marketing reigns supreme.
Page's suicide was unconnected, and I'm not sure he knew of the Lego counterfeiting, or the full extent of it at the time.