Wacky or not, we should treat our inventors better

The identity of Britain’s best-known business figure is always a taxing question. Difficult, because the field is narrow.

I mean someone who is instantly recognisable, who can walk into any bar or restaurant, and people will nudge each other. There are the Dragons’ Den panellists, Lord Sugar, Sir Richard Branson and that’s about it. Unless they’re regularly on TV or if they’ve been involved in scandal, such as Sir Philip Green, they won’t be familiar enough. Not even Sir James Dyson will provoke a response, not everywhere. As for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who created the world wide web, he enjoys anonymity, except among members of the tech community where he is lauded.

Back in 1985, one person who was hugely famous and whose picture was commonplace, was Clive Sinclair. The inventor of the world’s first pocket calculator – then the Sinclair ZX80, the smallest and cheapest home computer, which he followed with the best-selling ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum – Sinclair was a genius.

He died last week, aged 81, almost totally forgotten. When his death was announced, I had to do a double-take, I thought he’d been dead for years, such was his plunge into obscurity.

While he transformed lives with his ground-breaking computers, the sad aspect of Sinclair’s life, and the most telling as to how we regard and treat such people, is that he was the subject of national ridicule.

Sinclair may have come up with a PC that retailed for the unheard of price of less than £100, but he was pilloried for a machine that did not do as promised, which was riddled with flaws. This was the C5 electric three-wheeler. It was somewhere between a bike and a car. It was low-slung, open to the weather, and you sat on it like sitting in a chair with your legs outstretched. Difficult to manoeuvre, slow, and unable to go long distances without recharging, the C5 was a disaster. The sight of Sinclair, with his “boffin” beard and long scarf wrapped round his neck, attempting to drive the vehicle was a media dream. Sadly, and unforgivably, he became a popular tabloid joke figure. The C5 gained the moniker of “the poor man’s Robin Reliant” in cruel reference to a three-wheeler car that was also often held up as a topic of fun.

The fact that the C5 was ahead of its time and with refinement might have led the world in electric transport, was never raised. Compared with the e-scooters and some of the e-bikes on our streets, the C5 no longer appears so daft. None of that could help Sinclair. Rather than be admired for his triumphs and even respected for at least having a go where others would not and failing, he crashed. He did unveil new products but he was not allowed to forget the C5. To compound his fall, the press liked to focus on his private life and his fondness for models and dancers who were much younger than he was. Even that was presented as more evidence of Sinclair’s “whacky” personality.

To be fair, Sinclair did not help himself. He could be crotchety and sharp to interview. He was also sure of his own cleverness and he liked to boast. The C5, he predicted, would soon be hitting sales of 100,000 a year. In reality, it sold no more than 17,000 and towards the end of its short life, many of those were bought for curiosity and collecting, rather than to be used.

Later, he did admit his mistakes. “Clearly I should have handled it differently. If I had, it could have succeeded. I rushed at it too much and invested too much in the tooling and I should have gone a bit more gently into it.”

By then, it was too late. Sinclair would always be remembered as the nutty chap behind a strange electric trike rather than someone who with some of his other creations really did make a positive difference.

What happened to Sinclair speaks volumes about how we regard innovators. Anyone thinking of following suit, and dreaming up new devices and inventions, could be forgiven for pausing. Get it right, and you will be hailed as brilliant, but should it prove to be a turkey, the publicity you will receive will be demeaning and vicious. Far from being congratulated for trying, you will be abused and savaged. You will be unlikely to recover.

We don’t encourage our children to be creative, to aim big. Engineering, design and research, which should be in the highest rank of would-be careers, play second fiddle to going into the City and earning mega-bucks. Being something in private equity is seen as having greater significance than setting out to solve a problem.

Someone else recently canned his own electric car ambitions. Dyson spent £500m on the project before scrapping it. Crucially, he did not release it to the buying public when it was not ready. Sinclair did and paid the price; Dyson’s star remains undimmed.

In 1986, after the C5 debacle, Sinclair was forced to sell his computer business to Alan Sugar’s Amstrad, for £5m. Sinclair closed his offices in Cambridge and laid off the bulk of the staff.

His Sinclair Research company staggered on but eventually consisted of just Sinclair himself. It was a sad end. Sugar recognises the phenomenon. He once said: “In American culture, forming a company, starting something up and it completely failing, going bankrupt or whatever, is an accepted thing. They tried, they didn’t conquer, they failed and they started again. Some of the billionaires in America will tell you that they failed in their first ventures, right?

“The English culture is that if you go into the market with a big fanfare and then it fails, there’s a stigma attached. There’s a loss of confidence in that individual among investors. I have to say that we are not tuned into failure in this country. You either make it or you don’t, I’m afraid to say. I don’t agree it should be that way.”

Sinclair’s passing should be an occasion for collective navel-gazing and resolve to change, rather than an excuse for reminding us yet again of the crazy guy with his electric tricycle.