Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (2 page)

The Sinclair story reveals that, generally speaking, while his companies profit from technological innovation, their apparent tendency to take a short-term approach to corporate planning and product development tends to impede rather than encourage significant technological development within the group. In many respects our chronicle illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the new electronic industries as a whole. Ironically, recent developments in wafer-scale integration at Sinclair Research reveal genuine innovation as the company struggles to survive. Only time will tell whether these latest developments will amount to salvation or swan-song.

The threads of the Clive Sinclair story that we wish to explore overlap in time, and do not lend themselves to a simple chronological treatment. Whilst the long-term micro-buff may have no difficulty in following the sequence, others may find it occasionally confusing. We advise recourse to the full Sinclair chronology in the Appendix to keep a temporal perspective.

[1] BREADBOARDS AND BEDSITS

The hero of our story, Clive Marles Sinclair, entered the world on 30 July 1940. His engineer father ran a successful machine-tool business, and early life was comfortably cushioned by the upper- middle-class income the family enjoyed. Young Clive was sent to Boxgrove Preparatory School and was destined for a good public school when commercial catastrophe struck the Sinclair clan for the first, but not the last, time in this narrative. George William Carter Sinclair had gone for the broadening of his business base by diversifying into the import of miniature tractors. The venture collapsed, and company and income vanished. Possible parallels with the C5 fiasco aside, the practical result of this was to set the twelve-year-old Clive on a epic trek through thirteen different schools in some five years. His somewhat matriarchal mother kept shifting him along ‘
because it wasn’t really what I wanted
’ (Fortune, 8 March 1982). Sinclair himself has stated that he was ‘very bored’ at school (quoted in William Kay, Tycoons (Piatkus, 1985), p. 156), liking only mathematics and English as subjects, and it is certainly understandable that his social development was hindered by the lack of stability. Becoming, as he admits, ‘insular’ (Fortune, ibid.), he compensated by becoming a fanatic about the rapidly evolving radio and electronics field. His interest in mathematics was of some practical use here, and it is easy to imagine how, for a retiring and insecure child, a solitary, self-contained and esoteric hobby became obsessive, much as Sinclair products have led kids today to become bitten by the computing bug. Presumably, then as now, homework, healthy play and a full night’s sleep all suffered for the cause!

The foundations of the technology that Clive Sinclair has pressed into service throughout his career were established when he was seven years old, with the invention of the transistor in 1947. This signalled the end of the thermionic valve, with its problems of size, heat production and limited life. With the new technology of the transistor, silicon started its inexorable advance into all aspects of our lives. The first transistors were simple replacements for triode valves, silicon crystals with introduced impurities that gave them their amplifier and current-switching capabilities. These solid-state devices, using the semiconducting properties of germanium and silicon, had forerunners in the early crystal wireless sets, in which simple crystals were used for their property of passing an electrical current in only one direction. Clive would have used these, and the triode valves that replaced them, as he pursued his non-curricular studies with soldering iron and the breadboarded circuits that preceded the printed circuit board as the base on to which the components were soldered. Around the time he left his final school, St George’s College, Weybridge, at the age of seventeen, transistors were becoming ubiquitous. Commercial products used them, and they were cheap enough for the fanatical or well-heeled hobbyist to incorporate in constructions of one sort or another. As Sinclair recalled:

At school I got interested in mathematics, and that led on to electronics. It was a positive advantage that I arrived in the field just at the time that semi-conductors became available to individuals, as opposed to large research laboratories. It was an exciting and stimulating time, and electronics became more interesting with every month that passed. (Designer, July 1982.)

The era of the valve and the comforting orange glow of a warming-up wireless was over, and Sinclair was following his nose for the future, wherever it led him.

It did not lead him to a higher education. Whether family finances played a part in the decision or not, Sinclair’s scorn for the electrical engineering courses on offer at university is documented. Since he wanted to pursue only electronics, he had ‘
no desire for such a broadly based course
’ (Practical Computing, July 1982). Although he spurned the advantages of a university education himself, he was within a few years to find himself indebted to the system. Many of his products required the skills of bright young men fresh from the academic curricula that the young Sinclair, perhaps prematurely or ignorantly but certainly contemptuously, had dismissed. However, our early academic drop-out first needed a job.

As a hobbyist he had taught himself enough electronics to start contributing to magazines servicing the needs of others like himself. To start with he became a technical journalist, an editorial assistant at Practical Wireless magazine, drawing on his knowledge of the state of the art, derived from the original research papers to which he had graduated in his reading.

I knew I wanted to start a business, and the first thing was to find out how. Being a technical journalist seemed like a good idea, as it was an attractive and lucrative way of being employed; it got me about and gave me considerable freedom, and it also gave me the opportunity of learning at someone else’s expense. (Designer, July 1982.)

This set of reasons is typical of Sinclair’s thinking, as the reader will appreciate as we proceed.

The next opportunity that came Sinclair’s way was to attract the attention of Bernard Babani, who was looking for someone who knew about the emerging semiconductor field. At Bernard Books Sinclair became the editor of a series of technical works aimed at the hobbyist constructor. Ending up writing some of them himself, he had found a suitable niche. They rolled off his typewriter at a great speed, with such resonant titles as Practical Transistor Receivers, Transistor Subminiature Receivers Handbook for the Home Constructor and Modern Transistor Circuits for Beginners. The books were successful; indeed, some are still available. Sinclair apparently enjoyed the work of editor/author: ‘
I wrote most of them myself, and learned more than anyone who ever read the things
’ (ibid.). It is presumably a measure of his mature judgement of youthful hackwork that a good ten of his published works are omitted from his Who’s Who entry.

While he was with Bernard Books Sinclair joined the Mensa organization, which placed him in the top 2 per cent of the population as far as intelligence (or at least the capacity to answer IQ test questions) goes. As a precocious youngster, confident of his skills and contemptuous of those who didn’t possess them, the attractions of the implicit elitism of this organization are easily seen. He has remained an enthusiastic member, eventually becoming chairman.

Sinclair’s enthusiasm for business had been subdued but not inactive while he made his living as circuit designer and scribe. In 1961 he thought he’d found a backer for his miniature radio project and registered Sinclair Radionics Ltd, but the deal fell through after he’d handed in his resignation. Supporting himself for a while as a freelancer, producing articles and a couple more books for Bernard Babine’s publishing house, soon palled, and he went back to work as a journalist, this time for Instrument Practice, a more serious trade paper. Apart from the salary, this obviously exposed him to the whole burgeoning semiconductor industry, and he authored a British Semiconductor Survey in this period.

Our budding entrepreneur finally got started in 1962, when Sinclair Radionics burst into the public eye with adverts for a ‘micro-amplifier’. For a mere twenty-eight shillings and sixpence (roughly £1.42, but representing a lot more buying power in those far-off days) the hobbyist would receive a kit of parts which he (or, conceivably but improbably, she) could make up, ‘in under 2 hours using ordinary tools’ into ‘the smallest [amplifier] of its type in the world’. Pictured standing on a half-crown in the advert, the amplifier measured just ¾ by 3/8 by ½ inches. For the benefit of the younger generation of computer users, this is about 19 by 9.5 by 12.7 mm, and illustrates the start of the Sinclair miniaturization fetish. That the fetish was apparently shared by many others, and would later be justified as elegance in design, has contributed much to the Sinclair product range. Orders poured in for the amplifier to Histon Road, Cambridge, premises shared with Polyhedron Services and Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL), with whom Sinclair had much interaction in later years. CCL took on one Nigel Kember to pack the components and dispatch them to the eager public on Radionics’ behalf, since Sinclair was not eager to repeat his earlier mistake and was keeping his full-time job in the meantime. Some time in 1963, after the Sinclair Slimline pocket radio had appeared (forty-nine shillings and sixpence, ‘build it in a couple of hours’, ‘the set you will never want to be without’), he gave up security as a wage slave and devoted himself entirely to building up Radionics.

Alfred Marks, acting as advertising agent for Sinclair’s magazine mail-order assault, remembers his first encounter and early days working with Sinclair:

Babani had this red-haired fellow working for him, who smoked cigarette after cigarette, stubbing each one out half way and lighting another immediately. He had designed an amplifier, so called, which was no bigger than a threepenny piece. First advert I did for him appeared in Radio Constructor, for which I charged, I think, £23.

The micro-amp wasn’t exactly an overwhelming success, but he was selling transistors, and he then produced his first radio, the Slimline. We advertised this in the practical papers, and the thing which Sinclair did which was very, very important, he always went in for good presentation. His leaflets, instructions, packaging and suchlike were all good.

The case used to house the Slimline was a pillbox, a standard model, and the circuit used three transistors, although later he brought it down to two. He used trimmers to tune the thing with, as capacitors. I asked him why he didn’t use a reasonable capacitor - because these trimmers were fragile, flimsy things - but to no effect. (Interview, 25 September 1985.)

One should note for the benefit of non-technical readers that the supposition could be made that the higher cost of the ‘reasonable’ capacitor might well have played a part in Sinclair’s ignoring Alfred Marks’s suggestion for improving the quality of the product.

The business’s profitability in those early days was heavily dependent on a supply of reject metal-alloy transistors (MAT). Rejected by Plessey for their original purpose in early transistorized computers, they were nevertheless good enough for use in the circuits Sinclair designed for the Radionics products. With a cheap purchase price as ‘rejects’, they were tested by Sinclair and his team before either being incorporated in the kits or sold as separate transistors for a reported profit of up to 700 per cent.

I bought them, tested them myself and selected them into different categories, gave them type numbers which I invented, and then wrote articles about them for their applications in radios. (Clive Sinclair, BBC Radio 4, 18 January 1978.)

Having married into business Ann Sinclair (née Trevor-Briscoe) found herself pressed into service:

The transistors used to arrive in sacks. About three or four sacks would arrive, about the size of a sack of potatoes. I had test equipment consisting of a box that gave a different pitched buzz according to the transistor, and I must have tested a million of them altogether. It really became monotonous, because I’d no sooner finished one sack than another would turn up. (Ann Sinclair, ibid.)

High profits on components helped the cash flow, and again represents a consistent Sinclair trait of both minimizing component costs and maximizing revenue. Sound commercial practice in entrepreneurial terms, of course, but one that can arguably be carried too far. In connection with cheap and recycled components, one industry source told us a story of early Radionics days that bears repeating. Texas Instruments at Bedford used a large batch of reject transistors as hardcore for a driveway. Sinclair found out about this, presumably through industry contacts, and rather than shrugging his shoulders at a missed opportunity negotiated a price for digging the whole lot up again!

The second Radionics product was the micro-injector, the Micro-6. This signal injector, again using a couple of recycled MAT transistors, was packaged in the same-sized box as the famous matchbox radio, introduced in September 1964. This just squeezed in under the wire, or inside the matchbox, as the ‘Smallest Radio in the World’. Since size featured so prominently in the promotion of both this and the earlier Slimline, it is worth noting that neither product can be accurately described as a ‘first’, since as early as 1959 adverts for pocket radios and indeed for a wrist radio smaller than the Micro-6 can be found. Although improved components and Sinclair’s circuit designs undoubtedly made the Radionics products better radios, this is one area where he didn’t get in first. The advertising approach was paying off, however, with double-page spreads that changed with each issue and innovative approaches to grab the attention of the hobbyist. Alfred Marks again:

I had a picture of this thing [the Micro-6] held in a hand, and a map of Europe on the opposite page, and lines coming out [from foreign radio stations]. Now you could get these stations - you could pick up Russia and so on, largely due to the power of the transmitters, of course. What the advertisement didn’t say was that most of them came in together! They were toys, but they did a job. He had a lot of trouble with the battery holders at the start - he always rushed to get things into production. (Interview, 25 September 1985.)