Samuel Simeon Fels (February 16, 1860 in

Yanceyville, North Carolina Yanceyville is a town in and the county seat of Caswell County, North Carolina, United States. Located in the Piedmont Triad region of the state, the town had a population of 1,937 at the 2020 census. The settlement was founded in 1792 and was ...

– June 23, 1950 in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

) was an American businessman and philanthropist.

Biography

Born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family in

, Fels family relocated to

, where Samuel's older brother

Joseph Fels Joseph Fels (16 December 1853–22 February 1914) was an American soap manufacturer, millionaire, Georgist and philanthropist. Biography Born of German Jewish immigrants in Halifax County, Virginia, Fels moved with his family to Baltimore i ...

founded a soap manufacturing company, Fels & Co., which found success with the product

Fels-Naptha Fels-Naptha is an American brand of laundry soap manufactured by Summit Brands. The soap was originally created in 1893 by Fels and Company. It originally included the ingredient naphtha, effective for cleaning laundry and urushiol, an oil cont ...

. Samuel became the company's first president, a post he held until his death at age 90.

Philanthropy

An active philanthropist, in 1936, Fels established the Samuel S. Fels Fund, which provides support to Philadelphia-area non-profit organizations. Fels also founded the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

’s

Fels Institute of Government The Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania is a graduate school of public policy and Public administration, public management. Founded in 1937 by Samuel Simeon Fels of the Fels-Naptha, Fels Naptha Soap Company, the Fel Inst ...

. Fels is known for commissioning Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto Op. 14 in 1939. In 1912, Henry H. Goddard dedicated his book on eugenics '' The Kallikak Family'' to Fels: "who made this study and who has followed the work from its incipiency with kindly criticism and advice".

References

External links

Fels Institute of Government, University of PennsylvaniaThe Fels Planetarium at The Franklin InstituteThe Samuel S. Fels FundIso Briselli, the adopted son of Samuel S. Fels
* *Th

including correspondence, records and other materials, are available for research use at the

Historical Society of Pennsylvania The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is a long-established research facility, based in Philadelphia. It is a repository for millions of historic items ranging across rare books, scholarly monographs, family chronicles, maps, press reports and v ...

. {{DEFAULTSORT:Fels, Samuel Simeon 1860 births 1950 deaths American philanthropists Central High School (Philadelphia) alumni University of Pennsylvania people People from Yanceyville, North Carolina Businesspeople from Philadelphia American business executives American people of German-Jewish descent American eugenicists