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. Early life He was born on 5 June 1881 in Uddevalla, a town on the west coast of Sweden. He was the fourth of six children (four girls and two boys) born to Leonard and the much younger Alice Wenner-Gren (née Albin); only three of the children survived to adulthood: Axel, his oldest sister (Anna), and his younger brother (Hugo). His father owned a farm and exported timber to England, which made the family wealthy. Having spent his school years in Uddevalla, Wenner-Gren 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. 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 early. Career 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. 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. Earlier in his life he notably collaborated with Fredrik Ljungström. Wenner-Gren amassed a fortune from his early insight that the industrial vacuum cleaner could be adapted for domestic use. Soon after the First World War he persuaded the Swedish lighting company (called Lux at the time, but with his suggestion to rename it to 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