Fred Smith

Ship something from New York to Los Angeles, and it might sit in three different airports over five different days.

Nobody could guarantee when anything would arrive.

Businesses, of course, had learned to cope with this uncertainty.

Fred's solution was radical but simple.

Create a dedicated airline just for packages.

Route everything through a central hub in middle America.

Guarantee overnight delivery anywhere in America.

And you only need flights from each city to the hub and back, not between every city pair.

The math kind of worked.

Package going from New York to LA would first be flown to, say, the Memphis hub, where it would be sorted and rerouted out on the plane that had just brought in the shipments from Los Angeles.

He calculated the market size by analyzing what companies spent on emergency shipments, the urgent things, the things they absolutely had to get there.

He identified the target customers, businesses needing guaranteed delivery for critical parts and documents.

He even outlined the technology required, including a tracking system that would tell customers exactly where their packages were.

This was the idea, the seed of the idea for what would eventually become FedEx.

The professor gave it a C.

One of his friends, Bob Frame, recalls, I remember reading his term paper.

When he got back, Fred joked about the grade.

The idea always seemed to be in the back of his mind.

You knew he was going to do something with aviation.

He was going to devote his life to some aspect of it.