Installation of damping devices has been limited to diagonal or chevron brace configurations until the recent development of the toggle brace. This configuration magnifies the effect of damping devices, thus facilitating their use in stiff framing systems. This paper introduces the scissor jack damper system that was developed as a variant of the toggle-brace damper system, with the added advantage of compactness. The effectiveness of the scissor jack configuration is demonstrated through testing of a large scale steel framed model structure on an earthquake simulator. Experiments showed that despite the small size of the damping device considered, the scissor jack system provided a significant amount of damping and substantially reduced the seismic response of the tested structure. Response history and simplified analyses produce results that are consistent with the experimental results.