Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr.

Alexander Wallace Dreyfoos Jr. (born 1932 in New York City) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist based in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Saranac Lake, New York. He is the only son of cellist Martha Bullard Whittemore Dreyfoos (1898–1977) and photographer-inventor Alexander W. Dreyfoos Sr. (1876–1951) of Apeda Studios.

Dreyfoos graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1954 with a BS focusing on electronics, optics, and physics, assisted by MIT financing after the death of his father. Having also completed ROTC, Dreyfoos then served in the U.S. Air Force in Sembach, Germany, 1954–1956, commanding a 40-man photo lab critical to reconnaissance missions at age 22. Returning home, under the GI Bill he earned an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1958.[4] Dreyfoos earned his pilot’s license in 1960, and multiple ratings over time including airline transport pilot (ATP). He has owned six airplanes, including two Citation jets, and two turbine helicopters, all of which he flew single-pilot.

Dreyfoos founded Photo Electronics Corporation (PEC) in 1963, with George W. Mergens, to address problems in color print reproduction. They developed their groundbreaking Video Color Negative Analyzer (VCNA) in Dreyfoos’ Port Chester, New York basement, then set up a factory in a former church in Connecticut. The VCNA was marketed worldwide by Eastman Kodak Company. Dreyfoos moved PEC to Florida in 1969, and in 1970 a motion-picture version of the VCNA earned an Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From 1990 to 2006, the VCNA was part of the “Information Age: People, Information and Technology” display at the American History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and remains in its permanent collection. Dreyfoos later invented the innovative LaserColor Printer and assisted his son, Robert Dreyfoos, in developing a digital version of the VCNA for PEC called the Professional Video Analyzing Computer (PVAC).

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