Selma is a city in Fresno County, California. The population was 23,319 at the 2010 census, up from 19,240 at the 2000 census. Selma is located 16 miles (26 km) southeast of Fresno, at an elevation of 308 feet.
Fresno is the fifth-largest city in California.
The Fresno Scraper is a machine pulled by horses used for constructing canals and ditches in sandy soil. The design of the Fresno Scraper forms the basis of most modern earthmoving scrapers, having the ability to scrape and move a quantity of soil, and also to discharge it at a controlled depth, thus quadrupling the volume which could be handled manually.
James Porteous (1848–1922) was the Scottish-American inventor of the Fresno scraper.
The Porteous family is a Scottish Borders armigerous family.
A street sweeper or street cleaner may refer to a person's occupation or to a machine that cleans streets.
Robert Gilmour LeTourneau, born in Richford, Vermont, he was a prolific inventor of earthmoving machinery and the founder of LeTourneau Technologies, Inc. His factories supplied LeTourneau machines which represented nearly 70 percent of the earthmoving equipment and engineering vehicles used by the Allied forces during World War II, and more than half of the 1,500-mile (2,414 km) Alcan Highway in Canada was built with LeTourneau equipment. Over the course of his life he secured nearly 300 patents relating to earthmoving equipment, manufacturing processes and machine tools.
In civil engineering, a wheel tractor-scraper is a type of heavy equipment used for earthmoving. It has a pan/hopper for loading and carrying material. The pan has a tapered horizontal front cutting edge that cuts into the soil like a carpenter's plane or cheese slicer and fills the hopper which has a movable ejection system. The horsepower of the machine, depth of the cut, type of material, and slope of the cut area affect how quickly the pan is filled.
Frank Dusy was an early business leader of Selma, California and a co-inventor of the Fresno Scraper, the basis of most modern earth-moving machinery. On June 16, 1885, Dusy and his partner Abijah McCall were issued U.S. Patent 320,055, for their improvement on the Buck Scraper, invented by James Porteous of Fresno, California. Porteous, originally a wagon builder, purchased their patent and one held by William Deidrick as he perfected his machine. Dusy was also among the original investors in the Fresno Republican newspaper, which was eventually acquired by and combined with the Fresno Bee.
Abijah McCall was a co-inventor of the Fresno Scraper, a horse-drawn earth-moving machine upon which modern road- and canal-building equipment is based. Along with his partner Frank Dusy, McCall devised an improvement on the Buck Scraper, invented by James Porteous. On June 15, 1885, McCall and Dusy received U.S. Patent 320,055 for their version of the scraper. Porteous purchased the patents held by Dusy and McCall and also a patent held by William Deidrick as he perfected the scraper, which Porteous also manufactured at his factory in Fresno, California. The scraper was widely used in the Western United States and also put into use by U.S. engineers building the Panama Canal. Deidrick, Dusy, and McCall were all early residents of Selma, California, where McCall Avenue is named for McCall. McCall reputedly used a Fresno Scraper in building the road which runs through Selma and north to Clovis, California.
Richard Bowie Spikes was an African-American inventor. The holder of a number of United States patents, his improvements on existing inventions include a beer tap, automobile directional signals, an automatic gear shift device based on automatic transmission for automobiles and other motor vehicles and a safety braking system for trucks and buses.
Mary Elizabeth Anderson was an American real estate developer, rancher, viticulturist, and inventor of the windshield wiper blade. On November 10, 1903 Anderson was granted her first patent for an automatic car window cleaning device controlled from inside the car, called the windshield wiper.
Chad DiMera is a fictional character from the original NBC Daytime soap opera, Days of Our Lives, played since 2014 by Billy Flynn. The role was originated and played by Casey Deidrick from 2009 to 2014, when Flynn replaced him.
Stanford University v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc., 563 U.S. 776 (2011), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that title in a patented invention vests first in the inventor, even if the inventor is a researcher at a federally funded lab subject to the 1980 Bayh–Dole Act. The judges affirmed the common understanding of U.S. constitutional law that inventors originally own inventions they make, and contractual obligations to assign those rights to third parties are secondary.
Casey Jon Deidrick is an American actor and singer. Deidrick is best known for originating the role of Chad DiMera on the NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives.
Laser machine control is an electronic system for automatic operation of land scrapers or excavators. Advanced systems with GPS replaced these laser-based systems in some countries, but it is still used in some countries like India.
Ernest J. Kump Jr., was an American architect, author, and inventor based in Palo Alto, California. He was widely recognized for his innovations in school planning having designed over 100 public schools in California and 22 community and junior colleges around the world. Kump's most notable projects include Fresno City Hall (1940), the U.S. embassy in Seoul, Korea (1957), and Foothill College in Los Altos, California.
Mountain View Cemetery is a cemetery in Fresno, California, opened in the 1880s.
