Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. 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. The basis of Wenner-Gren's fortune was 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. Wenner-Gren also diversified his interests into the ownership of newspapers, banks and arms manufacturers, and acquired many of the holdings of the disgraced safety-match tycoon Ivar Kreuger.