Wenner-Gren Foundation

Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren (5 June 1881 – 24 November 1961) was a Swedish entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest men in the world during the 1930s.

He was born on 5 June 1881 in Uddevalla, a town on the west coast of Sweden.[1] He was the fourth of six children (four girls and two boys) born to Leonard and the much younger Alice Wenner-Gren (née Albin), though only three of them grew to adulthood, Axel himself, his oldest sister Anna, and his younger brother Hugo.

Having spent his school years in Uddevalla he moved to Gothenburg where he was employed for five years in the spice importing company of a maternal uncle. During this time, he learned English, French, and German at the local Berlitz school, and music at the local YMCA [2]. In 1902, at the age of 21, he left Sweden to further his studies in Germany. He first studied in the university town of Greifswald where he took some summer courses before moving on to Berlin where he studied at the Berliner Handelsakademie from which he graduated much sooner than usual.

After some difficulty, he found work with the German subsidiary of Alfa Laval Separator where he developed skills as a salesman, before quitting in 1904 to work selling agricultural machinery near Stuttgart which, with financial support from his father, had become his first financial enterprise.

In 1908, he traveled to America where he learned about engines for agricultural use, returning to Europe the same year. While in Vienna in 1908 he saw the Santo vacuum cleaner in the shop of Gustaf Paalen who had exclusive rights to distribute them throughout Europe [3]. After initially failing to become a European distributor for the Santo vacuum cleaner in his own right, he entered into a partnership with Paalen, purchasing a twenty percent interest in the company.

Wenner-Gren amassed a fortune from his early appreciation that the industrial vacuum cleaner could be adapted for domestic use. Soon after the First World War he persuaded the Swedish lighting company Electrolux, for which he then worked (securing the contract to floodlight the opening ceremony of the Panama Canal, among other successes), to buy the patent to a cleaner and to pay him for sales in company stock. By the early 1930s, Wenner-Gren was the owner of Electrolux, and the firm was a leading brand in both vacuum cleaner and refrigerator technology.

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