Media File: 1981
Sinclair in the News

New York Times
April 12, 1981

Inventor Trying Again In Consumer Electronics

By ELIZABETH BAILEY

The British, it is said, are great at designing a product but awful at exploiting it. In earlier eras, for example, much of the original work on the jet engine, the computer, radar and the early work on semiconductors was done in Britain. But the money on them was made elsewhere.

Clive Sinclair seems living proof that the axiom holds true today. In 1972, his Sinclair Radionics came out with the Executive, in a neck-and-neck race with Texas Instruments to market the world's first hand-held calculator. The Government poured millions into the venture. But it was swept away by a tide of cheaper, more sophisticated American and Japanese models. An economic artifact, the calculator now sits in the design gallery of New York's Museum of Modern Art. "The message has come through loud and clear that Sinclair is a good designer, but he is no good at running a business," said Richard Harwood, a financial analyst with the London-based brokerage firm Scott, Goff, Hancock & Company.

That may be rather too hasty a judgment. Mr. Sinclair is back, as head of Sinclair Research, maker of a highly successful line of microcomputers - and now he has what he hopes will be truly a first. It's pocket-sized television, a 6-by-4-by-1-inch black-and-white model that weighs only a few ounces. Again, he has Government support. And this time, Mr. Sinclair vows he is not going to repeat past mistakes. "We aim to be first in the market - and stay in the market," he said.

To get around production problems that have plagued other projects, Mr. Sinclair has contracted with Timex to produce both the minitelevisions and advanced microcomputers at the big watchmaker's Dundee, Scotland, plant. Marketing is expected to begin by the middle of next year. To avoid getting caught in the price trap again, he plans to sell the mini-televisions for just $100 or so. (An earlier model, announced in 1977, would have cost about $300.) Offices to direct promotion and sales (all mail order) have been opened in Boston, Munich and Paris.

Mr. Sinclair, the son of a small London businessman who now works for him, quit school at the age of 17 to engage in several entrepreneurial fits and starts - running a small publishing company, making transistor radio kits and writing for a technical magazine. He set up Sinclair Radionics when he was 22, to assemble components for transistor radios and hi-fi's.

Now 40, he firmly believes he will join the ranks of inventorsturned-entrepreneurs - like Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid instant camera -who prove capable of surviving in a world of high technology dominated by multinational companies with million-dollar research budgets.

First, however, he must put behind him a track record that has won him a lot of critics. Part of the problem is his own personality. Soon after introducing his hand-held calculator in 1972, for example, (the Executive cost the equivalent of $174 in 1972 and only performed five basic arithmetic functions) Mr. Sinclair began design work on his pet project, the pocket television, while at the same time throwing his small company behind the Black Watch, a digital wrist watch.

"Clive gets ideas so fast that sometimes he does the last thing he thinks up before he finishes with the first," explained one electronics expert who has watched Mr. Sinclair's roller-coaster career.

"Clive is not particularly prepared to listen to other people's ideas," added a former colleague, Christopher Curry, who has gone on his own to start the micro-computer company, Acorn. "He is, in a word, irascible."

Production of the Black Watch was held up for 18 important months because of problems with the supply of components. It finally began in 1975, but quietly died without a recouping of the initial investment.

Sinclair Radionics had never become truly large - the company had sales of some $20 million in its best year - and by l976, Mr. Sinclair was forced to seek outside financing in order to continue work on the pocket television.

He turned first to the City, London's financial community, but he found no takers. So the National Enterprise Board, a Governmentfinanced organization designed to provide financing for high-risk ventures, bailed out the failing company.

But Mr. Sinclair's highly individual style did not mix well with state capitalism. In 1979, Mr. Sinclair left, with a $22,000 "golden handshake," his design team, and his ideas. The N.E.B. wrote off the venture as a $17 million loss. The financial community watched, with a note of self-congratulation.

However, Mr. Sinclair promptly sold his house and his car (a collector's Rolls-Royce), set up Sinclair Research and began production of the ZX80, an inexpensive, $199.95 microcomputer. He also managed to continue the Government connection with a $1 million grant from the state-controlled National Research and Development Corporation for development of the pocket television, in return for an undisclosed royalty.

The lesson from the calculator battle did not go unheeded: "We want to remain cheap enough to discourage Oriental competition," said Mr. Sinclair. "There is, of course, always the problem in consumer electronics of being overtaken by cheaper products - we are making every effort to update our products."

With that in mind, Sinclair recently announced the ZX81 (with four microchips compared with 22 in the earlier model) to go into production at Dundee this spring and be priced at retail for about $120. The newer model can also be hooked into a printer, for an additional $112.

Mr. Sinclair is now producing 10,000 ZX80's a month, which puts him third in volume of personal computers, behind Apple and Tandy Radio Shack.

His models, which rely on conventional television sets for their screens and cassette recorders to store the programs, are slower, have less memory, can handle far fewer commands and do less complex calculations than those of Apple and Tandy. That difference is, of course, reflected in price. A basic Apple model runs to more than $1,500.

Mr. Sinclair is aiming at the novice who wants to learn his way around a computer rather than the small-business executive who wants storage and information processing capacity.

"The Sinclair model has gadget appeal," said Gavin Embry, an electronics consultant. "I have two, one to play with and one to take apart to see how it works."

More than 50,000 ZX80's were sold in the first nine months of last year, more than half of them abroad, bringing the company $1.8 million in profits on $7 million in revenues. Mr. Sinclair says that he will soon be selling more units than either Apple or Tandy.

And, typically, he has his eye on bigger things even than pocket television. "We have already started a detailed design of an electric car," said Mr. Sinclair. "Yes, I realize that General Motors is working on the same thing, but I'm not particularly nervous about that - and I'm sure that they are not very nervous about me, either. It's a case of mutual lack of nervousness."