James Porteous

James Porteous (1848–1922) was the Scottish-American inventor of the Fresno Scraper.

James Porteous was born in Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland. His father, William Porteous, had been a wheelwright and blacksmith who built and repaired carriages, wagons and farm equipment. After learning his basic skills, James Porteous emigrated to the United States in 1873, at the age of 25, and settled in Santa Barbara, California. In 1877, he moved to Fresno and established a wagon shop, where he prospered, manufacturing buggies and heavy wagons.

Having worked with farmers, Porteous recognised the dependence of the San Joaquin Valley on irrigation and the requirement for a more efficient means of constructing canals and ditches in the sandy soil, and he went about the task of devising an earth moving scraper for that purpose.

Porteous invented an improvement on the simple buckboard, a horse-drawn earth scraper, and refined his Buck Scraper, as he first called it, through several design improvements. His ideas, combined with those of fellow-inventors William Deidrick, Frank Dusy, and Abijah McCall, all of Selma, California led to the Fresno Scraper (1883). Porteous purchased patents held by Deidrick and jointly by partners Dusy and McCall as he perfected his machine. The basic design forms the basis of most modern earth moving scrapers, having the ability to not only scrape and move a quantity of soil, but also to discharge it at a controlled depth, thus quadrupling the volume which could be handled manually.

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