Axel Wenner-Gren

[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.

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 a home vacuum cleaner.

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.

Early in the war his rumored friendship with Göring and the German sympathies of the Duke led first the Americans and, following their lead, the British, to place him on an economic blacklist, enabling them to freeze his assets in Nassau.

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.

For a railroad project connecting California with Alaska, he got in touch with Glenn Hagen, previously an engineer with Northrop Aircraft, who had founded Logistics Research in Redondo Beach outside Los Angeles, developing computers based on magnetic drum memory.

[15] In 1956 and 1957, the model ALWAC III-E was considered a competitor to the IBM 650, having fewer parts and good economy, but no more than 30 units seem to have been delivered.

Bennett to build a railway north from Prince George into the untapped Peace River, Rocky Mountain Trench and eventually Alaska.

The interest in the north spurred a spate of mega-industrial projects in the region: the Bennett Dam flooding vast valleys, gas pipelines and plants at Taylor, coal mines and pulp mills.

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.