Overseeing a fleet of planes from his headquarters in Memphis, he transformed package delivery by promising overnight shipments.
Frederick W. Smith, who revolutionized express delivery as the founder and longtime chief executive of FedEx, a company that became so ubiquitous its name gained currency as a verb, died June 21 in Memphis. He was 80.
FedEx announced his death but did not provide a specific cause.
Mr. Smith was a college student at Yale, studying economics and working as a private pilot on the side, when he wrote a term paper in 1965 outlining his idea for a shipping business that would bridge land and sky, using planes to ensure medicine, computer parts and other time-sensitive packages could be delivered door-to-door.
As he later told it when asked about the grade, his paper wasn’t especially well thought-out. “I guess I got my usual gentlemanly C,” he said. Yet while light on specifics, his paper offered a blueprint for FedEx, providing Mr. Smith with the beginnings of an idea that he refined after graduating college, joining the Marine Corps and serving two tours in Vietnam, where he became convinced that a more efficient distribution system was needed to get supplies from one place to another.
His solution was a hub-and-spoke model, in which a central location served as a clearinghouse for deliveries. That concept became an organizing principle for FedEx, originally named Federal Express, which Mr. Smith launched in Memphis in 1973, using a fleet of 14 Dassault Falcon cargo jets to deliver 186 packages to 25 U.S. cities on its first night of operations.
Today, FedEx employs more than 500,000 people around the world and moves more than 17 million shipments a day. Its packages include birthday gifts, business supplies and legal briefs, as well as lifesaving medical devices and pharmaceuticals.
In a single year during the covid-19 pandemic, the company shipped about 300 million coronavirus vaccines across the United States, about half the total vaccines distributed by the federal government to that point.
