THIS MILLIONAIRE WAS LEFT AT THE CONTAINER AS A BABY AND HIS STORY IS FOR THE FILM: Due to his father’s illness, he invented the first smart device!
Freddie Fidgers got his first computer when he was only nine years old. Although the computer was old and did not work, it was love at first sight that led him to become an inventor in the field of technology, an entrepreneur and finally a millionaire.
Such a future could not have been foreseen by anyone who knew how difficult it was to start his journey in this world.
In the following text, I will describe the story I called: “Freddie Fidgers – the return of the written off”!
“Don’t let your circumstances define who you are”!
This is just one piece of advice that entrepreneur Freddie Fidgers wants to pass on to others.
When he was eight, he asked Father Nathan about the circumstances of his birth and the answer was unforgettable.
“He said, ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you right now, Fred. Your biological mother, she dumped you, and Betty Me, we didn’t want to send you into foster care, and we adopted you, so you’re my son”.
Freddie was found as a newborn next to a container (large garbage container) in rural Florida.
“When he told me that, I said, ‘Okay, I’m rubbish,” and I felt unwanted. But he grabbed me by the shoulder and said, ‘Listen, don’t ever touch that.”
Nathan Fidgers was a maintenance worker, and Betty Metti was Mae Figgers, a farm worker. They lived in Quincy, a rural community of about 8,000 people in North Florida, and were in their fifties when they found Freddie, in 1989.
They raised several children before him, but they decided to take Freddie when he was two days old and adopt him as their child. Freddie says they gave him all the love he could ever want, but the other kids in Quincy knew they were really brutal.
“The kids bullied me and called me Dumpster, the guy from the dumpster, telling me I was dirty and that no one wanted me,” he says.
“I remember that when I got off the school bus, other children were stalking me in the back, grabbing me and throwing me in a container and laughing at me.”
It even got to the point that the father had to wait for him after getting off the bus and drove him home, but the children also mocked Nathan. As for Freddie, Knight and Betty Me were his heroes and great role models.
“I watched my father always help people, stopping by the roadside helping strangers, feeding the homeless. He was an amazing man, they took me and raised me and that’s exactly the kind of man I want to be,” says Freddie.
A turning point
On the weekends, Freddie and Nathan would drive to the “diving container” – those buckets where you can find everything useful that other people threw. Freddie paid special attention to the possibly discarded computer.
“An old saying goes that it’s one man’s trash, another man’s treasure,” says Freddy, “and I’ve always been fascinated by computers. I’ve always wanted a Gateway computer, but at the time we couldn’t afford it”.
Finally, one day when Freddy was nine years old, they went to a second-hand shop called Goodville, where they came across a broken Macintosh computer.
“We talked to the salesman and in the end he said, ‘Hey, I’ll give it to you for $24″. We took the computer home, and I was overjoyed”, Freddie recalls.
He had already messed around a lot with a collection of radios, alarm clocks, or VCRs that Nathan had assembled, but the rotten Mac had now become the focus of his attention.
“When I brought it home and saw it couldn’t turn on, I decided to disassemble it. As I looked inside, I saw broken capacitors. I had soldering guns, radios and alarm clocks, so I took out the parts and soldered them to the board”, he remembers.
After about fifty attempts, the computer finally turned on! At that moment, he knew he wanted to spend his life working with technology.
“That computer removed all the pain of violence in my life”, he says.
Whenever he was attacked at school, he says he always thought, “I can’t wait to go home and play with the computer!”
“Playing” with computers!
He was 12 years old when others noticed his skills. At the after-school club, while the other children played on the playground, Freddy repaired broken computers in the school’s computer lab.
“If the hard drive was damaged, I would replace it. If it needed more memory, I would add more RAM. If it needed power, I would fix it”, he says.
The director of the extracurricular program was the mayor of Quincy, and when he saw that he was bringing broken computers back to life, he asked him to come to the town hall with his parents.
“When we came to the town hall, he showed me all those computers stacked in the back… Oh God, maybe there were a hundred of them there and he said they should be fixed,” he recalls.
Since then, Freddy has spent time after school repairing this pile of computers, for $12 an hour.
“It wasn’t really about money,” he says. “I had the opportunity to do something I loved and it was so much fun.”
A couple of years later, the possibility of programming appeared. Quincy needed a system to check the city’s water pressure meters, and the company set aside $600,000 to develop a computer program.
Freddie remembers the city manager saying, “Hey, Freddie is a computer wizard! He could probably help with this”.
“Sir, listen, I told him, if you give me a chance, I could do the same program. So he gave me that opportunity and I made that program exactly according to the specifications they needed. I wasn’t paid $600,000, oo, I already received a regular salary check and went home”.
Starting your own business
It was a turning point in Freddie’s life. He was only 15 years old, but now he has decided to leave school and start his own computer business – to the great misfortune of his parents.
“They believed in education, work, retirement, and I wanted to break that chain, I wanted to do something different,” he says.
His father’s health problems
Freddie’s job made it possible to make ends meet. But a few years later, Nathan’s Alzheimer’s disease began to develop rapidly.
One of the disturbing symptoms was that he woke up at night and repeated things he had seen on television earlier in the evening. This led to what Freddie calls the most traumatic thing that ever happened to him.
“It was about two o’clock one morning, and my father loved the old western“ Smell of Gunpowder (Gunsmoke), ”he walked into my bedroom and thought he was the main character, Matt Dillon. He told me,‘ I’m going to have to get out of town “. ”
Freddie says it was thick, but he pulled a gun from his father’s hand, put it back on the bed, and tucked it away. However, when he woke up in the morning, Nathan was not there!
This was another symptom of Alzheimer’s disease and it has happened before. Sometimes he would forget to dress completely before he wandered off, even though he always wore shoes.
This prompted Freddie’s first profitable invention.
“So I took my father’s shoes, cut the sole of the shoe, made a tile and put it inside the shoe with a 90 megahertz speaker, a microphone and a wide area network card,” says Freddy.
“I integrated it with my laptop – it was before Apple Maps or Google Maps – and I connected it through TomTom, the Garmin platform.
My father could actually wander off, and I could push a button on my laptop and say ‘Hey Dad, where are you?” I would address him through the speaker on his shoe, and he would say, “Fred, I don’t know where I am!”
Freddy could then find his whereabouts via a GPS tracker and go get him. He says he had to apply it about eight times.
When Nathan’s condition worsened, some family members wanted to put him in a nursing home, but Freddie refused. Instead, he began taking his father with him to business meetings.
“He didn’t leave me, so I won’t leave him,” Freddy said.
When he would go to see potential clients, he would leave Nathan’s father in the back seat of the car with the air conditioning, radio and steering wheel lock on.
“I was in a meeting once and I looked out the window and… oh my God, my father put the back window down and went outside,” Freddy says.
“So I started to panic and I was uncomfortable, but I said I had to go. Freddie ran out of the meeting and with relief found his father sitting in a nearby parking lot.
Freddie was 24 when Nathan died, at the age of 81, in January 2014.
“It honestly broke me”, says Freddy, “because all I ever wanted was to make my father happy”,
Freddie sold his “shoe finder” invention for $2.2 million and waited for the funds to be released. Nathan had always wanted to own a 1993 Ford pickup truck and a fishing boat, but now that Freddie could afford to buy them, it was too late.
“It really opened my eyes and taught me that money is nothing but a tool and I will do everything in my power to try to make the world a better place before I leave it”, says Freddy.
“Knowing my father, he was not a rich man at all, but he influenced the lives of many people and I want to do good and help everyone I can.”
Smart device
By this stage, Freddie had invented another smart device, also inspired by personal experience – going to George when he was eight and going to visit his mother’s uncle.
“When we got to his house, my mother and father knocked on the front door and no one answered. My father told me to go up through the window and open the front door.
Freddy went inside, unlocked the door, saw a cousin sitting on a chair by the fireplace and thought everything was fine.
“My father approached him, called my mother and said,‘ Betty he’s dead! ’Freddie’s cousin fell into a diabetic coma and died.
“When you think of someone with diabetes, when he checks his blood sugar, he has to write it down and take a diary, and in the case of my mother’s uncle, even if he wrote it, for the rural area where he lived, no one kept it. accounts, ”says Freddie.
So at the age of 22, Freddy made a smart glucometer that currently shares the blood sugar level of the person with the closest relative and adds the readings to their electronic health card, which the doctor can review. If a person’s blood sugar level is abnormal, he sends a warning with amber.
But Freddie has also started work on a larger project. He was aware that many parts of rural America did not have access to a 2G or 3G network, and in Quincy people were still using dial-up internet at the time, with its distinctive symphony of crackling white noise and high-pitched bells. He wanted to introduce the latest communications in these rural areas and in 2008 he submitted the first of many applications for permission from the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to start his own telecommunications’ company.
“I had to submit a petition to show that larger telecom operators will not enter and invest their infrastructure in a rural area with a population of less than 1,000 people,” he says.
It was not easy. In fact, he says, it took 394 attempts and it cost him huge sums of money. But in 2011, at the age of 25, Freddie became the youngest telecommunications’ operator in the United States. According to NBC News, Fidgers Communication remains the only black-owned telecommunications’ company in the country.
At first, Freddy did most of the work himself – from laying concrete for his first cell phone tower, to installing fiber optic cables.
He began providing services in rural areas of North Florida and South Georgia, not far from Quincy, and the company grew steadily. In 2014, Freddie launched a smartphone, the Figgers F1, with a device that detects movement and switches to “safe mode” above 10 mph, preventing people from sending messages while driving. The Figgers F3, which went on sale in 2019, contains a chip designed to enable wireless charging whenever the phone is five meters away from the “super basic charger” – a device that is waiting for FCC approval.
Freddie’s mother (83) has also now started showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. She says that she is very proud of what he has achieved and realizes that the glucometer, which could have saved her uncle’s life, is “something special”.
Freddy married Natley Fidgers, a lawyer, in 2015 and they have a girl. Like his business, he runs a foundation that invests in education and health projects and helps children and families at a disadvantage. Recent programs include the donation of bicycles to foster children and programs for people on the front lines of the corona virus pandemic.
Freddie says the most important piece of advice he would give his little girl about life would be to “never give up, no matter how cold the world seems” and try to positively impact the life of every person you meet. That is the message that Freddie’s father and follower number one, Nathan, would completely agree with.
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