Before Sinclair, UK electronics was seen as the province of big companies. After Sinclair, anyone thought they could start an electronics company. He inspired a generation.
He had a pioneer’s grasp of where the industry was headed and the intellect to develop the products which defined the future.
In common with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Clive found formal education tiresome. “I got fed up with school and didn’t want to go university,” he said, “I was educated up to ‘A’ level standard and after that, I educated myself. I was very good at maths and physics at school, and I was able to teach myself very rapidly. I found I could teach myself much faster than I could be taught. Because I was interested in it, learning was very easy.”
He was at school in the 1950’s, left school at 17 and got a job at a publishing company. “I wrote loads of books. I didn’t have to write the books myself, but it was quicker and more fun than finding authors to write them. They were for hobbyists – nothing terribly sophisticated,” he recalled. The books were mainly about the use of transistors.
Although invented in 1947, the Transistor was regarded by many engineers in the 1950’s as a new-fangled device. It was hobbyists, excited by the new technology’s promise, who were keen to know as much as possible about transistors and who were avid readers of books explaining how to use them.
In 1962, he left publishing and started life as a professional inventor – a childhood dream – fostered at the age of 6 by a radio programme called Toytown about a fictional inventor.
Dealing in transistors was the beginning of Sinclair’s business activities. “I did this deal – the first deal I ever did – with Associated Semiconductor Manufacturers,” recalled Clive, “ASM made transistors under licence from Philco in the US and was selling them to the computer industry at very high prices. I bought the rejects.” Financing for the deal was somewhat unorthodox. ” I managed to borrow half the money from a girl I knew.”
“Although they were rejects, they were very good transistors”, he remembered, ” they simply hadn’t met the various specs put on them. For those days they had very high frequency in comparison to anything else – 15MHz – which was dramatic in those days. They hadn’t made the specs required by the computer industry but, for the purposes which I was selling them for – which was audio and RF devices – they were absolutely perfect, beautiful.”
“I tested them, and gave them four different brand numbers for different gain categories, and wrote a book on how to uses them – published by Babani – and did articles in magazines about them. I also put in ads. I sold those transistors very well.”
“I bought them for a shilling (5p) each”, he says. The advertisements he ran at the time to sell them quote prices ranging from seven shillings and ninepence (38p) to fifteen shillings (75p) depending on performance. Enviable margins!
The cash-flow of the business was also enviable because, while his buyers sent in their money with their orders, he could get his advertisements published on credit.
“There were three magazines, really, in those dates Radio Constructor, Practical Wireless and Wireless World so I advertised in those,” he remembered, “fortunately they didn’t bother to check up on me because, when I placed the first ad in Radio Constructor, I’d designed the ad myself and I took it round to the magazine and they didn’t bother to check up on whether I had any money. I was going to pay the magazine with the money I got from the orders. Which I did. I just assumed that people would send me money and that I would have the money to pay for the ads. And that’s what happened. The cash flow was great.”
“That was the start of the business really,” he remembered, “I don’t know how much money I made from the transistors. That was the first deal, then I went on buying them and bought loads more.”
In 1961, Clive founded Sinclair Radionics which, by 1967, had a turnover of over £100,000 from selling hifi and radios. A few years later came the move which initiated the Cambridge Phenomenon.
“In 1967, I had a little office in Islington, and a friend of mine had a company in Cambridge – Cambridge Consultants – and he had chap who was working for him to do the mail order for me,” he recalled, “he left the company and we rented some space in a village outside Cambridge. Then it still expanded and so I rented a house in Cambridge, and I moved there, and we had a business established there for quite a few years. And then I went to the Mill (Enderby’s Mill) eventually.”
“All the time I was keeping tabs on what was happening,” he said, “from very early on, long before we were in Newmarket Road (the Cambridge offices), I started working on electronics watches – long before they existed. And then we were first in the pocket calculator business because we got this method of getting the power consumption down.”
The problem with making a pocket calculator was the greed for electricity of the LED in those pre-LCD days. Clive’s innovation, which made the pocket calculator possible, was a pulsing power supply, rather than a constant power supply, which reduced the amount of electricity needed. That meant smaller batteries were required which made possible a slimline, pocketable product.
The result – the Sinclair Executive – was nearly the first pocket calculator in the world. HP beat it, by some three months, with its Model 35 launched in July 1972. The Executive cost £79 – a revolutionary price for those days. It was one of his most satisfying lifetime achievements.
“Because what we did there was to make an extremely slim one – ours was only nine millimetres thick and everybody else was making great clunky things – much bigger than ours – and we managed to reduce the power consumption by a factor of between ten and thirty times because we could switch the chip on and off without it losing its data, so it was only on for very brief periods,” he recalled, “so we got the power consumption right down, so we could run it off these little tiny button cells. Nothing like that existed in the world and so we sold it very well in the US as well as over here.”
His next success was the world’s first single-chip scientific calculator launched in 1972. “We did it by taking an existing TI chip which was a four function calculator chip”, he recalled, “TI had made it internally programmable – you could change the ROM – but it had only three registers.” “We re-programmed that, much to TI’s amazement, to create a full scientific calculator.”
“A friend of mine, Nigel Searle, a computer scientist, did the programming, and I did the algorithms because no algorithms existed at that time which would have worked in just three registers.”
“We went to Texas, stayed in a hotel room, and did the whole job in a few days. We took the programme into TI, then went back and collected the chip,” he remembered, “TI were completely baffled by this. There was a chap at London University, a professor who specialised in algorithms, and he couldn’t figure out how it could ever be done in just three registers. He thought it was technically impossible.”
Show-stopping but less commercially successful, his famous Black Watch, launched in 1975, had a black display and you pushed a button to read the time displayed on a red LED. Sold as a kit, it cost £14.95.
It caught the imagination because nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. Even the advertisements were pioneering, including one of the earliest uses of ‘cool’ as in: ‘Styled in the cool, prestige Sinclair fashion’ .
However, they also said: ‘Easily built by anyone in an evening’s straightforward assembly’ and ‘From opening the kit to wearing the watch is a couple of hours’ work’. That was not the experience of many purchasers. The difficulties of putting the Black Watch together, and getting it to work, helped its commercial failure.
But, so stylish did it look, and so unconventional was its design, that the Swiss Horological Society exhibited the Black Watch at their Royal Horological Fair.
In 1978, Clive’s chief salesman, Chris Curry, went off to co-found Acorn with Hermann Hauser and the Cambridge Phenomenon got underway. Out of Acorn came Arm, Virata, Element 14, CSR, Pace and a host of other entrepreneurial companies.
Clive hit the big-time with the Spectrum computer launched in 1982 which became the best selling computer in both the UK and USA. Riding on that success, Clive IPO’d his company in 1983 and sold 10% of his shareholding raising £13.6 million.
Then came the flat-screen TV. “I had tried to get into pocket TV back in the Sixties because I missed the pocket radio market, which had been terrific, and I thought it would be fantastic to do the same thing with TV,” he recalled, “in 1966 I nearly came out with a pocket TV – not a flat screen TV – but a pocket TV – using a lot of ASM transistors.”
He then went for a bold innovation – to develop a flat CRT. It was to cost Sinclair Research £4 million.
“The flat cathode ray tube was the only one ever done, anywhere in the world,” said Clive, “it was the only one which ever worked. It was a lovely thing. A lovely little tube, and we designed and built a factory to make it. We did everything ourselves.”
“And we did this chip for it which would be remarkable even nowadays, and really unbelievable for its time,” he recalled, “it was one chip and it had all the TV on it except for the tuner and a few high-voltage transistors at the output. It was automatic multi-standard – it worked on NTSC, European PAL or English PAL – quite automatically – so you could take it anywhere and it worked.”
Clive got his pocket TV to market but there was a snag – no one wanted to watch TV on so small a screen. “It could be that people don’t like to look at something so small – that it’s a strain for our eyes to watch something so small,” he concluded.
The cost of developing the flat-screen TV and the QL business computer put the businesses under strain and then the move into EVs was an expensive flop.
Clive was a Great Englishman, courteous, curious, doing his own thing in his own way. Asked if he ever had a plan, he replied: “It was just a question of invention. A question of: ‘Where is the world going? Where do the opportunities lie?”