Waiting for an update on the conservation and restoration of our
Horten H IX V3 “Bat-wing Ship?” Here’s the latest! Our
conservation staff, in collaboration with curator Russ Lee, is
working with the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute
(MCI) to figure out the materials and technologies used to craft
the Horten H IX V3. For example, the transparent canopy was
analyzed with a portable Raman spectrometer and determined to be
a polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) plastic. PMMA was developed by
Rohm and Haas in the mid-1930s in Germany and the United States,
and the material is reputed to have been incorporated quickly
into aircraft canopies, gun turrets, and transparent noses. It
is lightweight, impact resistant, relatively easy to form, and
transmits light even better than glass. In this instance,
identifying the canopy as PMMA confirms what we already expected
from our research of trade literature from that period. It also
shows how studying our collection, visually and with analytical
tools like MCIs Raman