T. P. Wright

Theodore Paul Wright was an American aeronautical engineer at the Curtiss-Wright Corporation whose 1936 paper, "Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes" (Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, vol. 3, no. 4), first described the log-linear relationship between airplane production cost and cumulative production quantity now called Wright's Law. He reported the result as a family of curves — separate rates for labor, raw material, and purchased material — rather than the single flat percentage the name is now popularly shorthand for.

The vault treats his 1936 paper as the named origin point of a cost-quantity power law that recurs across its technology-forecasting cluster: its mathematical equivalence to Moore's Law under exponential production growth (claim-sahals-identity-equates-wrights-law-and-moores-law), an econometric critique of the coefficient it spawned (claim-nordhaus-learning-coefficient-statistically-unidentified), and an earlier, unrelated-discipline ancestor in 1899 skill-acquisition psychology (claim-experience-curve-originates-in-1899-telegraph-operator-psychology).

References

• claim-wright-1936-paper-verified-real-and-accurately-cited
• claim-wright-1936-defines-cost-as-power-law-of-cumulative-quantity
• claim-wrights-eighty-percent-curve-is-lot-average-cost-not-unit-cost
• claim-wright-1936-reports-four-distinct-curves-not-flat-eighty-percent
• claim-wrights-law-cost-falls-per-cumulative-production-doubling
• claim-sahals-identity-equates-wrights-law-and-moores-law
• claim-nordhaus-learning-coefficient-statistically-unidentified
• claim-experience-curve-originates-in-1899-telegraph-operator-psychology
• claim-cheaper-extraction-disruptions-fall-monotonically-not-hold-then-collapse
• claim-asml-euv-shipment-history-fails-sahals-exponential-precondition
• claim-asteroid-pgm-price-holds-then-collapses