Axel Wenner-Gren
Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren (5 June 1881 – 24 November 1961) was a
Early life
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); only three of the children survived to adulthood: Axel, his oldest sister (Anna), and his younger brother (Hugo).[2] 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
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.[3]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.[4]
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.[1][5] 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
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. In Mexico in the 1930s, he was in economic alliance with Maximino Ávila Camacho, strongman of the Mexican state of Puebla, whose brother Manuel Ávila Camacho became President of Mexico in 1940.[6]
World War II blacklisting
Wenner-Gren was reported to be a friend of Hermann Göring, whose first wife was a Swede, and in the late 1930s convinced himself that he could avert the coming world war by acting as a conduit between Göring and the British and American governments. His efforts proved unsuccessful, with all parties regarding him as a self-promoting nuisance without much influence on the plans of the Nazi regime.[7] However, others are suspicious of his role in the war, citing how (his) original Bank of the Bahamas was used to fund the Nazis and his friendship with Göring as potential proof of his private support for the Nazis.[8]
A disconsolate Wenner-Gren retired to his estate in
There proved to be little or no foundation to their suspicions that Wenner-Gren was a Nazi agent,[7] notwithstanding the appearance of his steam yacht Southern Cross (the world's largest at the time) along with ships from the Allied Navies at the site of the sinking of the liner SS Athenia on the first day of the war. Wenner-Gren's yacht Southern Cross rescued over three hundred survivors of the sinking and transferred some to nearby Allied ships and others continued to the U.S.
Other ventures
In the 1950s, Wenner-Gren also got involved in the early computer business. For a railroad project connecting
By 1956 the number of employees tripled to over 300 and the company was relocated to an industrial park in Hawthorne, California. The appearance of the transistor in the electronics industry in 1957 was a financial shock for all vacuum tube computer makers and by 1958 ALWAC in Hawthorne closed and its employees, with the help of Wenner-Gren himself, were successfully hired by Litton Industries and Autonetics and several smaller electronics companies. The follow-up ALWAC 800[17] was a failed design that never went beyond prototype, using not only core memory but also magnetic logic (a combination of semiconductor diodes and magnetic cores, cf. Hewitt Crane), and presold contracts nearly ruined the company.
Development was transferred to Sweden in 1958. The next model, named Wegematic 1000, a slight upgrade of the III-E, was shipped in 1960. Only a dozen were delivered and half of them were give-aways to universities, including one unit for the
Among Wenner-Gren's other interests were
Personal life
In late 1909, while returning from a trip to America on board a trans-Atlantic liner, he met Marguerite Gauntier Liggett who had been born on 15 October 1891 in Kansas City, Missouri. She was traveling with her sister, actress Gene Gauntier,[18] to Europe to complete her musical training as an opera singer. After a brief romance at sea, they traveled to London, where they married on 14 December 1909[19] before traveling on to Berlin where she would complete her studies.
Wenner-Gren died of cancer while staying at the Red Cross Hospital in Stockholm.[20][21]
The Viking Fund
Wenner-Gren also founded and
See also
References
- ^ a b c "Founding an international company | Electrolux Group". Archived from the original on 19 January 2015.
- ^ Luciak, Ilja (30–31 May 2012). "The Life of Axel Wenner-Gren – An Introduction". Wenner-Gren International Symposium – "Reality and Myth: A Symposium on Axel Wenner-Gren": 13, 14. Retrieved 13 February 2016.
- ^ a b Luciak, p.14
- ^ Luciak, p.16
- ^ Luciak, p.17
- ^ Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, New York: Harper Collins 1997, p. 493.
- ^ a b Leifland, 1989; Luciak, 2012; Luciak and Daneholt, eds., 2012.
- ^ "The original Bank of Bahamas was used to fund the Nazis 1939–1942 · Bahamianology". Bahamianology. 4 November 2017. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
- ^ "19. The ALWAC". Digital Computer Newsletter. 5 (4): 11. October 1953. Archived from the original on 7 April 2019.
- ^ Research, United States Office of Naval (1953). A survey of automatic digital computers. Office of Naval Research, Dept. of the Navy. p. 3.
- ^ Weik, Martin H. (March 1961). "ALWAC II". ed-thelen.org. A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems.
- ^ "Index of /pdf/logisticsResearch". www.bitsavers.org. ALWAC_III_Pricing_Dec54.pdf, General_Description_of_the_ALWAC_III.pdf p. 1.
- ^ Weik, Martin H. (December 1955). "ALWAC-III". ed-thelen.org. A Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems.
- ^ "ALWAC III Control Panel | X306.84 | Computer History Museum". www.computerhistory.org. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
- ^ Weik, Martin H. (March 1961). "ALWAC III E". ed-thelen.org. A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems.
- ^ Hallberg, 2007
- ^ "COMPUTERS AND DATA PROCESSORS, NORTH AMERICA: 2. ALWAC, Inc., ALWAC 800, Hawthorns, Calif". Digital Computer Newsletter. 9 (3): 1–3. July 1957.
- ^ "Sidney Olcott – Blog". www.sidneyolcott.com.
- ^ Luciak, p.15
- ^ "Axel Wenner-Gren, Financier, 80, Dead; Axel Wenner. Gren Dies at 80 Financier and a Philanthropist". The New York Times. 25 November 1961. Retrieved 15 August 2023.
- ^ "Milestones: Dec. 1, 1961". TIME.com. 1 December 1961. Retrieved 15 August 2023.
- ^ "University of Kentucky: Center for Biomedical Engineering". University of Kentucky. Archived from the original on 26 August 2009. Retrieved 9 November 2009.
- ^ http://www.wennergren.org Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
Literature
- Hallberg, Tord Jöran (2007). IT-gryning. Svensk datahistoria från 1840– till 1960-talet. ISBN 978-91-44-03501-7.
- Leifland, Leif (1989). Svartlistningen av Axel Wenner-Gren: en bok om ett justitiemord [The blacklisting of Axel Wenner-Gren: A book about a gross miscarriage of justice]. Stockholm: Askelin & Hägglund. ISBN 91-7684-158-8. This is the most important detailed study of Wenner-Gren, refuting the allegations regarding his peacemaking efforts during WWII. The author, Leif Leifland], was deputy foreign minister, and Sweden's ambassador to London.
- Reality and Myth: A Symposium on Axel Wenner-Gren, edited by Ilja Luciak and Bertil Daneholt. Stockholm: The Wenner-Gren Foundations, 2012.
- Luciak, Ilja. "The Life of Axel Wenner-Gren–An Introduction." In Reality and Myth: A Symposium on Axel Wenner-Gren, edited by Ilja Luciak and Bertil Daneholt. Stockholm: The Wenner-Gren Foundations, 2012., pp. 12–30.
(On pp. 21–22, points to Leifland 1989 as conclusive evidence that Wenner-Gren's blacklisting was a miscarriage of justice).
- Bolaños Guerra, Santiago & Jorge Ruiz Esparza, Axel Wenner-Gren. El vikingo que llegó del frío (The Viking Who Went South From the Cold), Mexico, 2008, 407 pages.
- Santiago Bolaños Guerra en colaboración con Jorge Ruiz Esparza "La Cruz del Sur" Axel Wenner-Gren el espía que México protegió. Ediciones B 322 Páginas. 2009 México.
External links
- Media related to Axel Wenner-Gren at Wikimedia Commons
- Newspaper clippings about Axel Wenner-Gren in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW