Henry Wells Founder of American Express
Henry Wells Founder of American Express

Biography of Henry Wells

Early Life

Henry Wells founder of American Express was a famous American businessman and entrepreneur. He was born in the year of 1805 on December 12 in Thetford, Vermont in United States of America. His ancestors moved to USA form United Kingdom almost seven generations ago that is why; he was basically from English blood. His original grand ancestor named as Thomas Welles moved to USA almost 250 years before his birth. He started his early education in his local town school when he was just 5 years of age. Later on, after his early education, he didn’t continue his education because he was not as much interested as much in studies.

Initial Career

As mentioned earlier, he couldn’t complete his study. That was the reason he started his career in a quite young age. After some jobs, he started his career by becoming a freight agent in Erie Canal in the year of 1836 and tried his own business for the first time. After its failure, he joined a magazine in Albany named as Harden Express.

Co Founder of American Express

Henry Wells is widely credited as co founder of American Express with William Fargo. During his career of almost 30 years, he joined many companies, did different jobs and tried his own business but all in vain.  The main point of his career was that, he just worked in newspapers and magazines field and industry which led him to be the founder of American Express. After initial failures of business, now he was passionate about his business because he knew the basic knowledge of the field. He was working in Harden Express at that time, when he shared his ideas of starting their own project of American express with William Fargo and as a result, American Express came into being in the early 1850s.

American Express

American Express was co founded by William Fargo and Henry Wells in the year of 1850. The company was founded by investing 50,000 by both guys and the main idea behind this company was to make it a banking and credit services company. Wells was the first presidents of company from 1850 to 1867 and later on promoted company on larger bases.  Generally American Express is a financial services, insurance, banking and credit services sector company with its branches in more than 25 countries all over the world including Argentina, France, Japan, India, Sweden and Mexico. Presently this company has the 62,000 employees working with it and its head quarter is in New York City, New York in United States of America. The employee growth of American Express is about 2% with global revenue of 31.6 billion United States dollars. It was ranked firstly in the best place to work list in the year of 2000.

Death

He died on December 10th in the year of 1878. He was about 73 years of age at the time of his death.