---
title: "T. P. Wright"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Theodore Paul Wright"
aliases: ["T. P. Wright","Theodore Paul Wright"]
first_seen: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Wright's Law","learning curve / experience curve","Sahal's identity (Wright's Law / Moore's Law equivalence)","Curtiss-Wright Corporation","power-law cost-quantity curves"]
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


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]]