A History of Technology. Vol. I: From Early Times to Fall of Ancient Empires. Vol. II: The Mediterranean Civilization and the Middle Ages. Vol. III: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution c.1500-c.1750. Vol. IV: The Industrial Revolution c.1750-c.1850. Vol. V: The Late Nineteenth Century c.1850-c.1900.

Oxford:: Clarendon Press, (1958)., 1958. Reprinted lithographically from sheets of the third impression. 5 volumes. Thick 8vo. xlix, 827; liv, 802; xxxvii, 766; xxxiii, 728; xxxviii, 888 pp. Indices, maps, tables, illustrations, color frontispieces, 36; 44; 32; 48; 44 plates. Pastedowns and free end-leaves foxed, else text and plates clean. Navy blue cloth, gilt-stamped spines, dust-jackets; jackets torn and foxed. Vol. V with slip reading "Spare copy returned by Lord McGowan. With the Compliments of Imperial Chemical Industries Limited" laid-in. Very good in good jackets. Preferred issue (thicker paper stock). "By the 1950s, a new conflict was growing between capitalism and communism, which would be fought as much through technology and economics as through military might. Charles Singer, a prominent British historian of science and medicine, was commissioned to prepare A History of Technology for Oxford University Press (with the help of an endowment from Imperial Chemical Industries) in the late 1940s. . . . Singer's emphasis of a 'gradual easing' of human conditions by means of technology differs from the inevitable revolutions associated with Marxism. Nevertheless, [Gordon] Childe still employed revolutionary vocabulary in his contributions to Singer's first volume—at a time when an avowed Marxist would have lost his job in the United States" (Oleson, p. 72). Oleson, John Peter. Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.