Inventor Steven Hampton

In the summer of 1963, 12-year-old Steven Hampton became foster child to Midwestern diary farming couple Glen and Audrey Kneer. He fed, cleaned, and helped milk 40 cows twice daily while also going to school. At age 14, Steven acquired a set of U.S. Air Force electronic training manuals and began exploring the beckoning field of solid-state electronics. He built various transistor circuits by scalping radios and junkyard TVs.

When he was 15, Steven secretly dissected his first padlock with his foster father’s bench grinder by removing the heads of the lock’s rivets. At 17, he was making his own lock picks. He was “popping” Master combination padlocks by freehand manipulation and could open a Russwin six-spooled pin tumbler bank door lock with a safety pin and small screwdriver. At age 18 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an Aviation Electronics Technician.

He returned to civilian life with an honorable discharge in early 1972 and then worked for a small telephone company as a switchman. While working there, he furthered his education with night school in the expanding field of digital electronics. In late 1973 he worked as a lab technician for a computer drive company where he performed electric motor armature tests with a rotary pendulum and used on-line "super-computers" of the early 70s to determine start-up transient factors. (Since then he has worked as a machinist, a robotics technician, a machine maintenance technician, a locksmith, television repairman and as an engineering technician where he helped design and build cutting-edge robotics equipment. He has been a published author with Paladin Press since 1987 and is considered a master locksmith and security expert.)[13]

In late 1974, Steven fell intoxicated with comparative religion and studied Eastern and Western philosophy from a score of noted and respected teachers. He became a Rosicrucian then a Gnostic Christian. He then turned to Hinduism and practiced yoga, astro-projection and physic healing. He became a student of Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche and a practicing Buddhist in 1976 and in 1977 moved to the monastic setting of Marpa House in Boulder Colorado for three years. He was a periodic staff member for four years at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (RMDC), an expansive Buddhist meditation retreat in the remote Colorado mountains (now called Shambhala Mountain Center).[14]

In 1979 he began three years of studying Tibetan White Crane Kung Fu and Chinese medicine under grand master Dr. Lucjan Shila in Boulder. He spent two years studying jujitsu and wing chung under the late Sensei John Angelos. (It was because of a basic White Crane move and a conversation with Sensei Angelos that led Steven to the revelation and inspiration to build his first actual Dean drive in 1992.)

In 1980, Steven became interested in the Dean Drive. Since then, he has conceived nine inertial engines and hand-built eight working prototypes for various applications, most of which are not Dean Drives. One drive displaces a ballistic 4-line pendulum while running. Another is an electronic recoilless jackhammer drive. In 2006 he completed inertial engine E-8, a dependable inertial propulsion spacedrive that loses 70% its weight while running on a floor scale.

Delores E. Hampton

Personnel Director

Centrifugål Dynamics Co.