Sinclair Research worried that Clive Sinclair himself was using his own personal wealth to fund his inventions. By 1990 the company's entire staff had been reduced to just Sinclair himself, a salesman/administrator, and an R&D employee. By 1997 only Sinclair himself was working at his company. In 1992, the "Zike" electric bicycle was released, Sinclair's second attempt at changing people's means of transport. It had a maximum speed of , and was only available by mail order. Much like the C5, the "Zike" was a commercial failure, and sold only 2,000 units. In 1999 Sinclair released the world's smallest radio, in the
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