The
Black Watch
(From The
Sinclair Story, by Rodney Dale)
It was Saturday lunchtime at
The Plough, Fen Ditton. 'Look at this', said
Sinclair, prestidigitating a little case out of
his pocket. There inside was something which
looked like a black plastic watch without any
face or hands. He pressed a button: it was 12.37.
'What do you call that?' we asked. 'Oh . . . The
Black Watch, of course' he said. Everyone fell
about.
And, indeed, Sinclair Radionics
might have survived the losses accruing from the
dying calculator market had it not been for that
trendy-looking quartz digital chronometer which
was wont to behave as though telling the time
were not its prime purpose.
The company had high hopes that
the profit on The Black Watch would outweigh the
losses accruing from the calculator price-war . .
. but announced in November 1975 with a major
advertising campaign, The Black Watch seemed
doomed from the start.
Certainly the original design
was sound, and the market was there. The Black
Watch was for those days - an unconventional
looking timepiece, moulded in black plastic with
a five-digit LED display. Inside it was a chip, a
quartz crystal, a tantalum capacitor and a
ceramic trimmer on a flexible printed circuit
board - and the batteries. It had three buttons:
one at the back for setting which, pressed in
combination wit one of the two buttons at the
front, advanced the hours or the minutes. Used
alone, the buttons on the front would display
hours and minutes or minutes and seconds; the
sleek, black appearance of the watch when its
four LEDs were not draining its battery was a
virtuous necessity.
Nothing like it had ever been
seen before: Sinclair was even invited by the
Swiss Horological Society to exhibit at the Royal
Watch Fair - a first for any company outside
Switzerland.
The watch went on the market
for £25. There was also a kit version at under
£15. But Sinclair was let down partly by
problems of moulding the case and partly by the
company who were supposed to be producing the
chips. At first, it was Mullard, but they aborted
the project without giving any reason for doing
so from that day to this, although Sinclair
thinks it was 'a direction from above'. The next
supplier was ITT Semiconductors who tried very
hard, setting up a line dedicated to making the
chips, but when they hit a series of production
snags they forgot to tell Sinclair. If you know
something is going wrong you can take steps to
overcome it; if nobody tells you, you tend to
assume that all is well.
When the chips finally started
to come through, Sinclair had lost two years, and
his place as potential world leader - there were
now similar watches on the market at a similar
price. For once he was not ahead of the
competition - and there were still problems with
the product. Nevertheless, Sinclair Radionics
announced that they still expected to win 30 per
cent of the UK digital watch market in 1976.
In June 1976 Practical
Wireless published an article on assembling
the Black Watch kit, which throws light both on
the kit and on the sort of people who read PW:
'For the temporary
connection of batteries, Sinclair advise the
use of a 'Bulldog" clip, but it was very
easy to short the batteries accidentally and
almost impossible to hold two batteries, a
flexible printed circuit and a Bulldog clip
in the correct positions, all at the same
time! This difficulty was aggravated by a
tendency for one digit of the display to
light up as soon as the batteries made
contact. The instructions said that this
might happen and that the remedy was to
interrupt the battery supply. Then, of
course, the clip, the batteries and the
flexible printed circuit tended to part
company once more! The problem of accidental
short circuits was cured by using insulating
tape on one jaw of the clip, but the
operation remained very difficult to carry
out.'
The idea of using two wooden
clothes pegs (of the spring type), two drawing
pins and a piece of insulated wire solved the
problem. This enabled the batteries to be fitted
one at a time and made the procedure
comparatively easy. The adjustment of the watch
took some four days to accomplish, but was not
difficult, rather tedious through having to wait
four days before being able to complete the
watch.
Clothes pegs aside, although
the fundamental design was good the manufacture
of the watch presented difficulties. Although the
Sinclair Digital Multimeters were undergoing
environmental testing, nobody seems to have
thought of applying the same developmental
rigorousness to The Black Watch. The chips had
been tested during the winter, when the
atmosphere was damp, but when the watch went into
production in the summer it was found
(eventually) that the slightest static affected
the chip, making it stable rather than unstable.
Instead of continually vibrating (as it should to
jog the time along) the crystal froze; the
display would show just one - extremely bright -
digit, while the batteries drained and became hot
- until sometimes they exploded. Fortunately, it
seems that no Soviet dignitary ever had a Black
Watch!
The batteries themselves were a
problem. The first batteries were the same as
those generally used in hearing-aids; they had a
ludicrously short life span of the order of ten
days, and it was hardly surprising that by the
time customers received their watches the
batteries were generally dead. So the watches
came flooding back to Sinclair Radionics - often
more than once which probably gave rise to the
legend that the company received returns far in
excess of the number manufactured. It seemed that
the only watches not returned were those thrown
away in sheer frustration.
Apart from problems with the
circuit and the batteries there were hitches in
the design of the mechanism to switch from one
function to another. Frequently it was impossible
to change the function - or even to set the watch
to the right time!
The plastic casing also caused
difficulties. The original case was made of a
plastic which turned out to be unglueable, so the
parts were designed to clip together. The glue
hadn't worked; the clips didn't work either. The
subcontractor who was asked to solve this problem
eventually sent Jim Westwood a small box on which
was written 'We've solved the problem of The
Black Watch!' Inside was a Black Watch with a
half-inch coach bolt through it.
Gradually the difficulties were
diagnosed and overcome. Silver oxide batteries
replaced the previous mercury oxide batteries.
Mike Pye and his engineering team devised a foil
screen to protect the circuit from static. But Practical
Wireless had this to say:
'Trying to fit the watch
into the case was where the problems really
started. The PCB assembly was too thick for
the space available and there were two
reasons for this. The impression was that the
flexible copper screen had not been part of
the original design; the instructions for the
fitting of this screen were separate from the
main assembly instructions. The two
thicknesses of screen obviously reduced the
front-to-back clearance between the PCB
assembly and case. However, the main reason
for the difficulty was that the soldered
joints were protruding too far from the PCB.
The importance of making very small solder
joints had not been emphasised sufficiently
in the instructions, which merely called for
the use of a fine-tipped soldering iron, and
"small wire cutters capable of cropping
within 1/2mm of the PCB".
Sinclair have since stated
that an improved IC is now being supplied
which is free from any effects due to
external static. The insulated copper screen
is no longer necessary.'
Then another problem arose. It
had been decided to manufacture the watch
in-house. Hundreds and thousands had to be made
to supply new orders and to replace the dud ones
already sent out. Hundreds and thousands of
returned watches had to be repaired. There were
only about twenty people to do all this.
Components flooded into St Ives and piled up.
David Park (then sales
director) remembers one day delivering 5000
replacement Black Watches to somewhere in
Scotland. The following day, another replacement
order for 5000 watches had to be delivered in the
South. None of these was making the company any
money. Staff were working all hours; they just
couldn't cope.
By the end of 1976 the watch
was working, but by then the public didn't want
to know. The Black Watch contributed to a
Sinclair reputation that still lingers. Richard
Brooks wrote in The Sunday Times: 'Is
not Sinclair a company which has great ideas,
which is smart, innovative, but is it not a
company which fundamentally keeps producing great
ideas and then fails to exploit them properly?'
It's an observation with a disturbing amount of
truth in it.
Eventually the problem of The
Black Watch was solved by putting the single chip
into a completely different case and marketing it
as a slim and elegant car clock which sold very
well without doing much for the cash-flow problem
at the time.
When I was researching this
book I went through a Sinclair archive box with
Jim Westwood. We found one of these clocks,
pressed the button, and there was the time. It
was still working perfectly after nearly ten
years!
'Why', you may well ask, 'was
The Black Watch released in so imperfect a
state?' The problem was that it was a seemingly
simple product (compared with the Microvision) on
which Sinclair Radionics had pinned their hopes
as the calculator market stagnated. One can sense
the mounting panic with which orders for Black
Watches must have been filled: 'Let's send them
out quickly in ease they're working when they
arrive; anyway perhaps they won't be sent back .
. 'When a man knows he may go broke in a
fortnight, his mind scoots off in all directions
at once. Cash was flowing like anything, all in
the wrong direction. Immense sums had been
invested in the Microvision; further immense sums
were likely to be needed to push it laboriously
up to that corner just round which success always
lies. Without further investment, the price of
the television could never be brought down. Where
was the money to come from?
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