Traveling, fishing and duplicate bridge are all hobbies Jim Daughton has taken up since retiring in 2006, but his writing became more than a hobby. After self-publishing two books with more on the way, he says it’s become his new job.
Daughton, born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from Iowa State in 1959, 1961 and 1963, respectively.
After college, he went to work at IBM in New York and then Vermont. He currently lives in Minnesota, where he worked for a short time at Fabri-Tech before going to work at Honeywell for 17 years, eventually becoming the vice president.
In 1989, Daughton founded NVE Corporation, which manufactures and distributes products that use spintronics, a nanotechnology that applies electron spin to acquire, store and convey information.
NVE Corporation went public in 2000, just one of the many accomplishments from Daughton’s extensive career in industry. In retirement, he’s transitioned from contributing to factual, scientific papers to authoring memoirs and children’s books. He says one challenge is writing something interesting enough that people will want to read it.
Daughton’s first book was a memoir called A Rustic’s Journey to the Twenty-First Century, in which he tried to answer the questions he wished he’d asked his parents when they were alive. “There was nothing in writing that talked about that,” he says, “so I got it down on paper as best I could for coming generations.”
His grandson was the inspiration for his second book, Goldilocks, James, and Baby Bear Battle the Space Alien Smots! It was published in 2012.
“I told him Goldilocks and the Three Bears over and over, and it always captivated him,” says Daughton. “But he got interested in Star Wars so we modified the story quite a bit. Over three to five years, the story changed to the published version.”
The best part about being an author, Daughton says, is the enjoyment of creating—something that carried over from his time as an engineer. Throughout his career he wrote or co-wrote about 80 papers and invented or helped invent about 40 U.S. patents.
Daughton self-publishes all of his books through a publishing house in Minnesota, where the author pays to get help editing and illustrating. From start to finish, his first three books have taken about two years each.
His third book, another children’s book expected to be out later this year, is called A Conversation with a Butterfly. Daughton’s current project, Travels with Jim and Della, is about his traveling adventures with his wife Della.
“My wife and I have circled the world four times and circumnavigated South America twice on cruise ships. We’ve also been on many other shorter cruises,” he explains. “We travel more than the average person.”
The couple has also journeyed across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Scotland and Canada. They traveled some while Daughton was still working, but most of it has been since he retired, when they began “cruising in earnest.”
Daughton says he’s not looking past Travels with Jim and Della at this point because he expects it will take a couple more years to complete. He is, however, considering the possibility of publishing a collection of short stories.
With several books under his belt, Daughton considers himself “at least a serious amateur” when it comes to writing. But he’s happy it came after his time in industry. Engineering was the right career choice for him—he says he did exactly what he was supposed to do.