Sinclair C5 of Liverpool, which planned to sell 1,000 of them to an Egyptian businessman for use on a university campus while another 1,500 were intended to be sold in the UK. Many reasons have been suggested for the failure of Sinclair Vehicles and what Dale calls "the jigsaw of the C5's disappointment". One of the receivers of Sinclair Vehicles, John Sapte, suggested that Sinclair had taken the wrong tack with its marketing of the C5: "It was presented as a serious transport, when perhaps it should have been presented as a luxury product, an up-market plaything." Ellar's director Maurice Levensohn took
Sinclair Scientific fraction of the cost of competing calculators. In 1972, Hewlett-Packard launched the HP-35, the world's first handheld scientific calculator. Despite market research suggesting that it was too expensive for there to be any real demand, production went ahead. It cost (about ), but despite the price, over 300,000 were sold in the three and a half years for which it was produced. From 1971 Texas Instruments had been making available the building block for a simple calculator on a single chip and the TMS0803 chipset appeared in a number of Sinclair calculators. Clive Sinclair wanted to design a calculator to