Leonard Michael Greene (June 8, 1918 – November 30, 2006) was an American inventor and aerodynamics engineer who held more than 200 patents, many of which are aviation-related.
Apart from his inventive life, Greene also served as the founder and president of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies, a think tank to address issues such as poverty and social awareness.
During World War II, Greene joined the Grumman Aircraft Corporation in Bethpage, NY, as an aerodynamicist and engineering test pilot.
"8 To address a key problem of supersonic aircraft – window-shattering sonic booms when they break the sound barrier – he turned to the earthworm for inspiration.
He patented a device, sold to Boeing in 1994, that would use a hollow fuselage and strategically placed ducts to suck in, compress, and then release air through a plane's tail.
He remained involved in the business until his death and as recently as 1998 co-patented and marketed an airborne power line detector and warning system for helicopters.
They included a three-dimensional chess game, a device to aid blind painters by using musical notes to identify colors, and an instrument of revenge against telemarketers who interrupted dinner.
As a successful businessman, Greene implemented innovative employment policies, barring mandatory retirement age, actively recruiting the differently abled, and providing profit sharing at his own manufacturing facility.
Seeking a broader forum and greater impact for his ideas, in 1974 he founded and financed the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies (ISES), a small policy research organization in White Plains, NY, that helped advance his ideas on welfare reform, health care, tax reform – and after Greene's son was killed in the September 11 attacks in 2001 – foreign affairs.
According to Ostergren, who worked with Green at ISES, “He didn’t consider himself a Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal,”13 but searched for practical solutions to problems that intrigued him.
In pursuit of these interests, Greene was a member of both the Special Committee on Welfare & Income Maintenance and the Council on Trends & Perspectives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
He also served as a member in the Income Maintenance Committee of the Community Service Society and the Work Group on Welfare Reform of the Task Force on the New York City fiscal crisis.
[3] Greene flew the first Corporate Angel Network Flight on December 22, 1981, when he brought a 16-year-old cancer patient home to Detroit who had just received treatment in New York City.
[4] An avid sailor, Greene became a technical adviser to several America's Cup races before buying two-time winner Courageous from Ted Turner in the early 1980s.