Just A Car Guy: quite an advertising campaign, lined up on the waterfront in Melbourne, Australia. These rolled through Stockholm, Sydney, London and more, turning sidewalks into showrooms.

Monday, January 12, 2026

quite an advertising campaign, lined up on the waterfront in Melbourne, Australia. These rolled through Stockholm, Sydney, London and more, turning sidewalks into showrooms.

Axel Wenner-Gren was not an inventor, but he had an inventive mind that could see the possibilities of others’ inventions. Born in 1881 in Sweden to a family made wealthy by exporting lumber, he spent five years working for his uncle’s spice-importing company in Gothenburg. In those hours after school, he picked up English, French, and German and then moved to Germany, where he enrolled in business school, from which he graduated early.

Wenner-Gren continued to work as a salesman and by the end of World War I, he held controlling interest in a company called Svenska Electron that was apparently representing a Swedish lighting company named Lux.

In one version of the story, Wenner-Gren successfully convinced Lux to buy a patent for a home vacuum cleaner, agreeing that in lieu of cash, he would get stock in Lux based on how well the vacuum cleaners sold, eventually owning enough stock that he controlled the company.

in 1919 that a licensing agreement between Elektron and Lux gave Elektron the sole rights to sell Lux vacuum cleaners

by the 1930s Wenner-Gren was one of the wealthiest men in the world. While his name isn’t familiar to us today, his efforts to obtain the vacuum-cleaner contract for the Vatican may have spawned the Hollywood trope of door-to-door salesmen who demonstrated vacuum cleaners.

Supplying the Holy See with vacuums would not only be a valuable contract, it would undoubtedly be a promotional coup for any appliance maker. Five companies each made a pitch, and each were given a piece of soiled carpeting to clean using their respective machines. Wenner-Gren waited until the other four were done with their demonstrations, and then went over their pieces of carpet with an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. When he opened the dustbag, showing how his machine picked up dirt the other cleaners left behind, the contract was his.

Wenner-Gren commissioned a body shaped like an Electrolux vacuum cleaner to be mounted on an automobile chassis. The reaction was so positive that the company commissioned an entire fleet of Citroën-based Electrolux cars and BSA motorcycles with Electrolux-shaped sidecars to promote the brand in Stockholm, Berlin, and London.

Electrolux contracted with coachbuilders Karosseriwerke Drauz in Heilbronn, Germany, and another firm in Denmark to do the fabrication.