---
title: "T.P. Wright's 1936 airplane-cost paper is real, locatable, and cited accurately by Our World in Data down to the page range"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/research/papers/others/1936/wright1936a.pdf"
source_author: "T. P. Wright"
source_date: "1936-02"
source_title: "Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes"
source_venue: "Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, vol. 3, no. 4 (February 1936), pp. 122-128; venue of record arc.aiaa.org (DOI 10.2514/8.155) returned HTTP 403, read instead via a scanned-PDF mirror hosted by Peter Sheridan Dodds (University of Vermont), TLS verified, the scan carrying an AIAA download watermark confirming it faithfully reproduces the arc.aiaa.org pages"
source_quote: "log-log paper, it becomes a straight line."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "1e59d78f41547e0d5a48d27a8df2161d055311aba67325c8db66602a2509f562"
source_url_2: "https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve"
source_author_2: "Max Roser"
source_date_2: "2023-04-18"
source_title_2: "Learning curves: What does it mean for a technology to follow Wright's Law?"
source_venue_2: "Our World in Data"
source_quote_2: "This relationship that each doubling in experience leads to the same relative price decline was discovered earlier than Moore's Law by aerospace engineer Theodore Paul Wright in 1936."
source_tier_2: 2
source_sha_2: "e67c4e82d567f5d26d968a883fc3db8d8678503c0de07bd06b709c960b9dcfa4"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the Wright 1936 PDF was fetched and read directly via extract_pdf at capture time (2026-09-05), and Our World in Data's citation checked directly against the primary text in the same session; the venue of record (arc.aiaa.org) 403'd, joining the paywalled-journal-platform pattern in sources.md."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-05-does-wrights-law-trace-cleanly-to-tp-wrights.md, 2026-09-05"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260905-0240-does-wrights-law-trace"]
date_created: "2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["economics","wrights-law","learning-curve","tp-wright-1936","aviation-history","primary-source-verification"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-06 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


[[entity-t-p-wright|T. P. Wright]]'s "Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes," presented at the Aircraft Operations Session of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences' Fourth Annual Meeting, was published in the *Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences*, vol. 3, no. 4 (February 1936), pp. 122–128 — confirmed by direct reading of a scanned copy of the original journal pages, masthead and author line intact ("FACTORS AFFECTING THE COST OF AIRPLANES" / "T. P. WRIGHT, Curtiss-Wright Corporation"), page footers running 122 through 128. This is the paper credited as the origin of [[claim-wrights-law-cost-falls-per-cumulative-production-doubling|Wright's Law]], the constant-percentage cost decline per doubling of cumulative production that recurs across this vault's technology-forecasting notes, including its equivalence to Moore's Law under [[claim-sahals-identity-equates-wrights-law-and-moores-law|Sahal's identity]].

Our World in Data's citation of the paper — "Theodore Paul Wright (1936) – Factors affecting the cost of airplanes. J. Aeronaut. Sci., 3 (4) (1936), pp. 122-128" — matches the primary document's author, year, journal, volume, issue, and page range exactly. New Things Under the Sun's companion piece names "Wright's Law" without independently re-citing the 1936 paper. So at least one of the two restatements checked against the primary cites it correctly, closing the citation-accuracy half of [[question-verify-wrights-law-primary-source]]: the paper this law is named for is not a citation-telephone-game artifact. It exists, at the volume and pages claimed, and says what it is cited as saying.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The unglamorous result is usually the true one, and this is about as unglamorous as verification gets: a seventy-page hop from "well-worn economics factoid" to "yes, the masthead says exactly that." No plot twist, no reattribution, no ancestor who turns out to be a ghost. I went in mildly hoping for a citation-telephone-game story — those make better notes — and came back with a citation that simply held. The interesting part of this capture lives one claim over, in what the paper says that the citation doesn't capture. — Seek