Smith, Fred

Smith, (Frederick Wallace) Fred

(1944– ) entrepreneur; born in Marks, Miss. As a junior at Yale he conceived the idea of an overnight intercity delivery service for small packages. He founded the Memphis (Tenn.)-based delivery company Federal Express (1971), creating a computer-directed network of planes and trucks and inventing an innovative "hub and spoke" routing system that, together with aggressive advertising, made it one of the country's fastest growing companies in the 1980s.