10/22/2026
What is PFG’s heritage in defense? It starts with an amateur telescope maker named Fred Ferson.
In the 1930s, Fred Ferson of Biloxi, Mississippi, made telescopes as a hobby. As World War II approached, he saw that the military would need more precision optics than industry could supply. He left his insurance career and taught himself to make the lenses and prisms the military needed. In 1941, Fred, Albert Ingalls and Russell Porter proposed to the Army that amateur telescope makers could help meet demand. The result was the “Roof Prism Gang.” Fred wrote most of its technical instructions, the techniques that helped scale wartime prism production. Ingalls described him in Scientific American: “If discouraged, he smiles. If worse discouraged, he grins – and works.”
Fred went on to found Ferson Optics in Ocean Springs, which made optics for the Mercury and Apollo programs and for missile testing.
In 1977, Fred’s daughter Janet and her husband, Don Green, founded PFG Precision Optics with John Plummer of Plummer Precision Optics in Pennsylvania. In 1987, PFG acquired the Ocean Springs facility it still calls home.
Today PFG is still family-owned and in its fourth generation in precision optics. Fred’s work began with a wartime problem: the military needed precision optics faster than industry could make them. The U.S. defense industrial base faces that same problem today. We build Made in the USA optical components, assemblies and thin-film coatings for defense and aerospace programs, with the security, compliance, and scale those programs require. The tools have changed since 1941. The mission hasn’t: solve hard problems, build domestic capability, and support the warfighter, just as Fred did.
