Hans-Joachim Braun, Helmut-Schmidt-Universität, Hamburg

SHOT and ICOHTEC are both international organizations dealing with the history of technology. In the beginning SHOT consisted almost exclusively of US scholars while ICOHTEC, as part of the <International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science/Division History of Science>, was an international organization from the start, but with an emphasis on Europe. During the years the composition of these two organizations has changed as has their relationship to each other. Looking at the development of this relationship and analyzing the main causes of change will be the first purpose of this paper.
From the membership figures of both SHOT and ICOHTEC it immediately becomes clear that SHOT is a much larger organization which, in spite of its large size and different scholarly disciplines, is relatively coherent whereas ICOHTEC, much smaller, is more heterogeneous. Why is this so and is it, regarding the size of SHOT, justified to speak of a giant-dwarf relationship? Looking at the ICOHTEC membership it shows that many ICOHTEC members are also members of SHOT and this is and has generally been true of all ICOHTEC officers. Therefore and for other reasons there has never been a feeling of rivalry between the two organizations – mind you, Mel Kranzberg was the driving force in the origin of both organizations. The sense that ICOHTEC, the younger organization, is complementary to SHOT, has been predominant. In spite of large personal overlaps ICOHTEC has – to an extent –  a different clientele. I will argue that in spite of the fact that SHOT has gone international quite some time ago ICOHTEC’s existence is still justified. However, in order to advance from a mere coexistence to a more intensive, fruitful collaboration between SHOT and ICOHTEC, new ideas are needed. The second purpose of this paper is to suggest some relevant perspectives for the future.