Richard Wells (112)

Richard Wells (22 July 1734–c. 14 February 1801) was a merchant, landowner, inventor, and politician, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born near Sheffield, England, he immigrated to Philadelphia in 1750, where he was apprenticed to a merchant and then opened his own shop. In 1765, he relocated to Burlington, New Jersey, where he owned farmlands and a flax oil mill. His other landholdings included a purchase he made with Governor William Franklin in the Lake Otsego region of New York, which he visited in 1769. Wells presented the American Society with plant specimens and helped respond to a questionnaire submitted to the APS by the Marquis de Condorcet. A lifelong inventor, he produced, among other things, a horse-drawn snow-plow and a shipboard water pump, which was presented to the APS and described in its Transactions. He also managed the United Company for Promoting Manufactures, encouraged domestic silk production, and owned a “spermaceti works,” which converted whale fat into lamp oil. And he supported John Fitch’s efforts to invent the steamboat through financial investment and assistance with the pamphlet that asserted Fitch’s precedence over his rival James Rumsey. During the American Revolution, Wells served as an engineer and supplier of troops, but his Quaker beliefs precluded further efforts. He was vice-president of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisoners, director of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Pennsylvania Hospital. After the abolitionist Anthony Benezet chastised him for slaveholding, Wells oversaw a Friends school for black children. A supporter of the revised Pennsylvania constitution of 1790 and the federal constitution, he was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1790 and appointed cashier of the Bank of the United States in 1791. (PI)