FOUNDER

Leonard M. Greene was a remarkable innovator whose creative thinking and inventive mind made an indelible contribution to the advancement of society and technology. The holder of more than 150 patents, his achievements go far beyond his core field of aviation safety to include enhanced performance of America’s Cup yachts, “visible speech” for the hearing impaired, a formula for linking color and sound, bilingual film “sound titling”, and a plan to transform the federal social budget to provide greater income security, middle class tax relief, and market incentives for productivity growth.

His experience as an inventor, entrepreneur, and pioneer in a wide variety of disciplines convinced him that there were many other practical and intelligent ways to look at issues. This vision led to his founding the Institute for SocioEconomic Studies, whose mission is to offer a climate conducive to developing plans that will help all Americans make ends meet, and to encourage the adoption of those plans by government leaders.

During the Second World War, years before the first experiments that made supersonic flight possible, Greene presented the first formula for breaking the sound barrier. After the war, he started the Safe Flight Instrument Corporation to manufacture and market his invention, the Stall Warning Indicator. Called “the greatest lifesaver since the invention of the parachute” by the Saturday Evening Post, the Stall Warning Indicator received the Flight Safety Foundation’s first Air Safety Award and is found in all aircraft today. Responding to another potentially deadly threat to aviation safety, Greene invented and patented the first on-board Wind Shear Warning System in 1976. For these and numerous other breakthroughs, Greene was awarded the 1976 Flight Safety Foundation Award for Meritorious Service and the 1996 National Business Aircraft Association Award for Meritorious Service. In 1991, he was inducted by Sen. John Glenn into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 1999, he received the Allied Signal/Bendix Trophy for Aviation Safety from the Flight Safety Foundation. He received Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Laurels Award in the Field of Electronics in 1999, and their Laureate Award for Lifetime Achievement as a Pioneer in Flight Safety, Performance and Innovation in 2001. In 2002, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office honored him with their Contribution to American Innovation Award.

Leonard Greene experienced poverty as a youth during the Depression and never forgot it. As a successful businessman, he implemented innovative employment policies, barring mandatory retirement age, actively recruiting the differently abled, and providing profit sharing long before such programs were common. Seeking a broader forum and greater impact for his ideas, in 1974 he founded the Institute for SocioEconomic Studies as a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to enhancing economic and social opportunity and improving quality of life. Through the Institute, he supported original research and advanced breakthrough ideas on poverty reform, senior citizen issues, urban regeneration, and health care reform. In 1975, thanks to his foresight, ISES was the first organization to provide Margaret Thatcher a forum to speak in the United States. He advocated a revolutionary change in tax policy that would extend economic opportunity and incentives by transforming existing social welfare programs into a generous national tax rebate. In pursuit of these interests, he testified before Congress and was a member of both the Special Committee on Welfare and Income Maintenance and the Council on Trends and Perspectives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He also served on 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.

Greene also co-founded the Corporate Angel Network (CAN), a nonprofit that makes corporate planes available to transport cancer patients free of charge to and from distant hospitals, and established the Chain Scholarship Foundation, a scholarship program for college seniors who pledged to repay their scholarships for the benefit of future college seniors.

Greene was author of the books, Free Enterprise Without Poverty (Norton, 1981), The National Tax Rebate: A New America with Less Government (Regnery, 1997), and Inventorship: The Art of Innovation (Wiley, 2001). He held degrees in Engineering from City College/City University of New York, and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law by Pace University in 1977.

For more than 30 years, Leonard Greene was deeply concerned with America’s social problems, convinced that eradication of poverty is not only possible, but also essential to preserving our free enterprise system. The Institute is dedicated to preserving Leonard Greene’s legacy.