Read the house as

The idea behind HurffHaus

A Roycroft for
robot inventors.

HurffHaus is my house, and one day a campus: a for-profit community of liberal artists, technologists, thinkers, doers and robots.

The creed

One idea, handed down four times, with a source for each.

  1. 1859

    “FINE ART is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”

    John Ruskin, The Two Paths, 1859

  2. 1909

    “Head, Hand and Heart.”

    The Roycrofters, carved-oak legend in The Motto Book, 1909

  3. 1913

    “I believe in the hands that work, in the brains that think, and in the hearts that love.”

    Elbert Hubbard, the Salesman’s Creed in The Book of Business, 1913

  4. 2026

    Transistor, Servo, Battery.

    The HurffHaus creed

Head becomes Transistor

Logic and moderation. A transistor decides how much current gets through.

Hand becomes Servo

Work, feedback and equanimity. A servo returns to its set point however hard it is pushed.

Heart becomes Battery

Love. It is the stored energy everything else runs on.

Hubbard was already writing in electrical terms. The Book of Business says “Success is voltage under control” and “Realize that you are a Divine Transformer.” Transistor, Servo, Battery continues his vocabulary.

Numbered by year because the lineage is a sequence. Every line quoted is verbatim from its source.

A working town

Why the campus will be a business.

Roycroft was not a commune. At its peak more than 500 people worked in East Aurora, New York: a print shop, a bindery, furniture, copper and leather shops, a farm, a bank and the Roycroft Inn, with a band, a library, nightly classes and concerts, and visiting speakers nearly every week.

Hubbard called it a “semi-communistic corporation” and added, “we have always been able to meet our payroll.” It lasted because it was a business.

Mottos were one of its products: cards on handmade paper, carved oak slabs with copper bands, leather panels and sets of one hundred for businesses. The doors of the Roycroft Inn carry one of them: “The love you liberate in your work is the love you keep.”

“A bee alone can make no honey.”

Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, compiled 1927

Kept, with sources

Hubbard is a teacher here, not a saint.

Hubbard was a salesman first, a borrower of other people’s lines and a man of real contradictions. Parts of what he wrote do not survive. This house keeps what does, quotes it word for word, names the book and the year, and credits the original author when he borrowed.

New mottos made here are credited to me, after Elbert Hubbard. Nothing is put in his mouth.

Sources

Primary texts first. All three books are public domain.

HurffHaus has no affiliation with the Roycroft Campus.

The work itself is in the biography.

Read the working biography

</> is not △

This is the same page, read the way a machine reads it. The syntax is all here. The meaning is yours.

JSON-LD embedded in https://hurff.haus/house

Also here for machines: /house.md, the page as Markdown, and /llms.txt, a guide for language models.

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