Planet Sinclair: Other Products: The Black Watch


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The Black Watch
Sinclair Radionics, 1975

Exactly a decade before the C5 fiasco, Sinclair was nearly ruined by another disastrous product - the Black Watch, launched in September 1975 at £17.95 in kit form and £24.95 ready-built.

It was a unconventional-looking digital watch, moulded in black plastic with a five-digit LED display. Its most unusual feature was its lack of buttons - instead, it had two panels which turned on the display and allowed you to see hours and minutes or minutes and seconds, depending on which you pressed. The adverts rather obscurely described it as having "a touch and see case" with "no unprofessional buttons".

The Black Watch was a disaster from the start. The list of problems is long and depressing:

The chip could be ruined by static from your nylon shirt, nylon carpets or air-conditioned office. This problem also affected the production facility, leading to a large number of failures before the watches even left the factory. The result was that the display would freeze on one very bright digit, causing the batteries to overload (and occasionally explode).
The accuracy of the quartz timing crystal was highly temperature-sensitive: the watch ran at different speeds in winter and summer.
The batteries had a life of just ten days; this meant that customers often received a Black Watch with dead batteries inside. The design of the circuitry and case made them very difficult to replace.
The control panels frequently malfunctioned, making it impossible to turn the display on or, alternatively, impossible to turn it off - which again led to exploding batteries.
The kit was almost impossible for hobbyists to construct (and barely any easier for Sinclair's hard-pressed workforce). Practical Wireless advised readers to use two wooden clothes pegs, two drawing pins and a piece of insulated wire to work the batteries into position. You then had to spend another four days adjusting the trimmer to ensure that the watch was running at the right speed.
The casing was impossible to keep in one piece. It was made from a plastic which turned out to be unglueable, so the parts were designed to clip together. The clips didn't work either and the problem was turned over to a subcontractor. Sinclair later (much later) received 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 bolt driven though it.

A very high percentage of Black Watches were returned, leading to the legend that Sinclair actually had more returned than had been manufactured. The company had to go through the business of sending out tens of thousands of replacements, with no financial benefit whatsoever. Matters were made far worse by the perennial lack of a customer services department - only 20 people were available to repair and return all the faulty watches. The backlog eventually reached such monstrous proportions that it still hadn't been cleared two years later.

The Black Watch fiasco had a devastating effect on Sinclair's finances: the company made a loss of £355,000 for 1975-6 on a turnover of £5.6m. The company would have gone bankrupt had the Government, in the shape of the National Economic Board, not stepped in to prop it up with subsidies. It was somewhat ironic that the Thatcher government - of which Sinclair was an ardent supporter and from whom he gained his knighthood - abolished the NEB and the safety net it provided. The next time his company tottered, Sinclair had no option but to sell it to an arch-rival.