The book opens with a broad survey, in part Ⅰ , of the historical literature on technical change. It attempts to provide a guide to a wide range of writings that illuminate technological change as a historical phenomenon. The first chapter discusses aspects of the conceptualization of technological change and then goes on to consider what the literature has had to say on (1) the rate of technological change, (2) the forces influencing its direction, (3) the speed with which new technologies have diffused, and (4) the impact of technological change on the growth in productivity. A separate chapter is devoted to Marx. Marx’s intellectual impact has been so pervasive as to rank him as a major social force in history as well as an armchair interpreter of history. Part Ⅱ is, in important respects, the core of the book. Each of its chapters advances an argument about some significant characteristics of industrial technologies. Chapter 3 explores a variety of less visible forms in which technological improvements enter the economy. Chapter 4 explicitly considers some significant characteristics of different energy forms. It examines some of the complexities of the long-term interactions between technological change and energy resources. Chapter 5, "On Technological Expectations", addresses an issue that is simultaneously relevant to a wide range of industries — indeed, to all industries that are experiencing, or are expected to experience, substantial rates of technical improvement. The last two chapters of Part Ⅱ are primarily concerned with issues of greatest relevance to high-technology industries. Chapter 6, "Learning by Using", identifies an important source of learning that grows out of actual experience in using products characterized by a high degree of system complexity. In contrast to learning by doing, which deals with skill improvement that grow out of the productive process, learning by using involves an experience that begins where learning by doing ends. The final Chapter in part Ⅱ , "How Exogenous Is Science" looks explicitly at the nature of science technology interactions in high-technology industries. It examines some of the specific ways in which these industries have been drawing upon the expanding pool of scientific knowledge and techniques. The three chapters constituting Part Ⅲ share a common concern with the role of market forces in shaping both the rate and the direction of innovative activities. They attempt to look into the composition of forces constituting the demand and the supply for new products and processes, especially in high-technology industries. Chapter 8 examines the history of technical change in the commercial aircraft industry over a fifty-year period 1925—75. Finally, the two chapters of Part Ⅳ place the discussion of technological change in an international context, with the first chapter oriented toward its long history and second toward the present and the future. Chapter Ⅱ pays primay attention to the transfer of industrial technology from Britain to the worldwide industrialization, because nineteenth- century industrialization was, in considerable measure, the story of the overseas transfer of the technologies already developed by the first industrial society. The last chapter speculates about the prospects for the future from an American perspective, a perspective that is often dominated by apprehension over the loss of American technological leadership, especially in high-technology industries. By drawing upon some of the distinctive characteristics of high- technology industries, an attempt is identify possible elements of a future scenario
（）deals with Marx's intellectual impact.
A．Chapter Ⅰ
B．Chapter Ⅱ
C．Chapter Ⅲ
D．Chapter Ⅳ
