Inventor Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81
Pocket calculator pioneer who transformed home computing but came unstuck with the C5 vehicle
Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor renowned for his pioneering pocket calculator, and transforming home computing, has died, aged 81. Born in Richmond, Surrey, Sir Clive had an early fascination for electronics and industrial design. He had enormous success with his Sinclair Executive calculator, which was the first truly pocket-sized calculator, and his ZX Spectrum home computer. However, he is also remembered for the failure of his one-person electric car, the C5.
SIR CLIVE SINCLAIR, the inventor, who has died aged 81, achieved major early advances in personal computing but will also be remembered for the spectacular failure of his one-person electric vehicle, the C5. He had been fascinated by the possibilities of microelectronics and industrial design since his boyhood, and his first career milestone, in 1972, was the slimline Sinclair Executive calculator. Just 9 millimetres thick, this was the first truly pocket-sized gadget of its kind; it retailed at £79.95 (the equivalent of £922 today), but that was half the price of clunkier competitors.
After a brief diversion into digital wristwatches, Sinclair’s next and most significant launch was the ZX80 home computer, brought to market in 1980. Available either in kit form (the buyer had to solder it together) or readybuilt, this was the first computer sold in the UK for less than £100. It was succeeded by the slightly more sophisticated ZX81 and then, in 1982, by the ZX Spectrum, by some distance the UK’S bestselling personal computer and for a time a world leader in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
Its memory was minuscule by today’s standards, at a maximum of 48 kilobytes, and the design was not without eccentricities – the low-cost moulded rubber keyboard was said to have the feel of “dead flesh”. But the Spectrum heralded a new age of home computing and video gaming, and the fast-growing Sinclair operation, based in a converted bottling plant near Cambridge, was a flagship success story of the early Thatcher years.
By now a wealthy man, and having been nominated by Margaret Thatcher herself for a knighthood in 1983, Sinclair was riding high in public esteem. But the launch of the C5 vehicle in January 1985 turned into a disaster of comic proportions, from which his reputation and corporate fortunes never quite recovered.
“A plastic version of the Reliant Robin without the roof,” was one description of the wobbly, opentopped three-wheeler. It boasted a top speed of 15mph and packed insufficient power to climb the most modest hill, while the low, recumbent position of the driver felt distinctly unsafe in the vicinity of lorries, buses or aggressive cab drivers.
The C5’s range was a theoretical 20 miles, but its batteries drained rapidly in normal conditions and “virtually packed up”, Sinclair had to admit, in frosty temperatures such as those of the launch event at Alexandra Palace. One journalist offered a test drive reported that his “Formula One bath-chair … had travelled five yards outdoors when everything when phut.”
Conceived and marketed as an alternative mode of urban transport for both motorists and cyclists, the C5 appealed to neither. Some 14,000 were manufactured but only 5,000 had been sold before Sinclair Vehicles went into receivership in August 1985. The vehicles become cult items for collectors (Sir Elton John kept two as runabouts on his estate) but were rarely to be spotted on public roads.
Clive Marles Sinclair was born in Richmond, Surrey, on July 30 1940, the son and grandson of engineers. His father ran a machine tools business, but had financial difficulties which disrupted Clive’s education, in which he took O-levels at Highgate School and A-levels in physics and maths at St George’s College, Weybridge.
By then he was precociously absorbed in the range of ideas that would shape his future career – he had sketched a blueprint for a one-man submarine at the age of 12, and started selling radio kits by mail order as a sixth former. But he chose not to go to university, instead becoming a technical writer for Practical Wireless magazine and the author of handbooks such as Modern Transistor Circuits for Beginners.
He founded his first company, Sinclair Radionics, in 1961. Products included the Micromatic transistor radio, “smaller than a matchbox”, which Sinclair had begun to design at school, and the Microvision pocket television. But he continued working part-time as a technical editor until his real commercial breakthrough with the Executive calculator.
The aftermath of the C5 debacle coincided with a tailing-off of Spectrum sales and the lacklustre launch of the QL (for “quantum leap”) personal computer for business users. Running short of cash, Sinclair contemplated a deal with Robert Maxwell which did not proceed.
Instead, in 1986, he sold his product range and brand name to Alan (later Lord) Sugar’s Amstrad Corporation for £5 million, retaining only a small R&D operation for his own future projects. Amstrad made back the purchase price simply by selling off surplus Sinclair stock – but later attempts to enhance Sinclair products with additional entertainment features proved unsuccessful, and the brand was effectively abandoned in 1992.
Much of Clive Sinclair’s imaginative focus in the 1990s and 2000s was on personal transport. He came up with the Zike electric bicycle; the Zeta electric motor to fit on to conventional bicycles and a similar motor for wheelchairs; the Sea-doo Seascooter for scuba divers; and finally, in 2008, the A Bike, a lightweight folding cycle with tiny wheels, designed to be carried easily on trains by commuters. The X-1, a power-assisted pedal-bike with an egg-shaped canopy reminiscent of the C5, was latterly in the offing. But renewed mass-market success eluded him.
As for the C5 itself, Sinclair was rueful about the mockery it brought, but philosophical about his mistakes: “I think it was a good idea then and I do now … Clearly I should have handled it differently. I rushed at it too much.”
He continued to work, rather secretively, on designs for a variety of advanced electric vehicles, and declared his enthusiasm for the concept of a “flying car” which he thought “technically entirely possible”.
Sinclair’s dedication to the drawing board did not preclude an energetic private life, conducted from a flat overlooking Trafalgar Square, which belied his image as a bespectacled (and in younger days ginger-bearded) boffin. It was perhaps not surprising that he was the long-serving chairman and president of British Mensa, the organisation for people with unusually high IQS (his own was measured at 159). But he was also a high-stakes poker player, appearing in Channel 4’s
Late Night Poker and its spin-off,
Celebrity Poker Club – in which he was the £25,000 winner of the first series in 2003, against finalists who included the politician Zac Goldsmith and the racing commentator John Mccririck.
Sinclair married first, in 1962, Anne Briscoe; they had two sons and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1985, and thereafter – to the glee of the tabloids – he was sighted in pursuit of a succession of glamorous younger women, including the actresses Ruth Kensit (sister of Patsy) and Sally Farmiloe (best known for her torrid affair with Jeffrey Archer, as well as her role in the maritime soap
Howard’s Way).
Asked whether this quest was indicative of a midlife crisis, Sinclair replied: “No, I just always liked to have a girlfriend, and that’s what I did.” In 1996, at Stringfellow’s nightclub in London, he met Angie Bowness, a lap dancer and former Miss England 36 years his junior who told a reporter: “I get cross when he’s described as ‘balding Sir Clive’. He’s actually incredibly attractive to women.”
After an on-off relationship, during which she had a son by another partner, they were married at Las Vegas in 2010 but later parted. He is survived by his daughter and two sons.