Then & now

CLIVE SINCLAIR, Inventor

BEFORE STEVE JOBS and Bill Gates, one English inventor’s name was on every geek’s lips. Clive Marles Sinclair was a young wireless enthusiast from Richmond, Surrey whose miniature electronic kits were snapped up by specky schoolboys who loved to tinker with transistors and circuits. Sinclair was just 21 when he formed his first company, Sinclair Radionics, in 1961; over the next two decades, he would pioneer the miniaturisation of electronics, inventing the slimline pocket calculator in 1972 and developing the ZX80 home computer which sold for £100. The ZX range culminated in the mighty Spectrum computer in 1982, which became the UK’s best-selling home computer, shifting around 15,000 a week at its sales peak. It spawned a whole industry among young computer whizzes, who developed hundreds of programmes for Spectrum users to try out.

The Spectrum earned Sinclair a knighthood, and earned his company, Sinclair Research, £55 million. But Sinclair was looking beyond computers to his other great passion – personal transportation devices. In 1985, he unveiled the C5, a futuristic-looking tricycle that was powered by batteries and reached a top speed of 15mph. But despite looking like something out of Star Wars, the unwieldy, impractical vehicle – totally unsuited to driving on busy roads – became an object of ridicule, and now stands as a quaint relic of the decade, like Rubik’s cubes or CB radios. The C5 fiasco lost Sinclair a fortune, and he was forced to sell his trademark to Alan Sugar’s Amstrad.

Sinclair hasn’t given up on his dream of energy-efficient personal transport for everyone, and recently developed the A-Bike, a lightweight bicycle that folds up into the size of a briefcase for commuters to carry onto trains and buses. While by no means a disaster on the scale of the C5, so far the A-Bike hasn’t caught on.

After he divorced his wife Ann in 1985 – they had three children – Sinclair embarked on his latter-day passion: living the life of a playboy. During the 1990s and noughties, he was a fixture of London nightlife, and a regular at Stringfellows. It was there he met lapdancer Angie Bowness, 36 years his junior. The couple married in 2009, and Bowness has become Lady Sinclair. He was also romantically linked with actress and producer Tricia Walsh, Ruth Kensit, a cousin of Patsy Kensit, and Howard’s Way actress Sally Farmiloe. Sinclair also became a celebrity poker player, competing on the TV series Late Night Poker.