Wright publishes the airframe cost-quantity relationship
Theodore P. Wright publishes "Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes" in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, reporting that airframe labour cost fell by a consistent percentage with each doubling of cumulative units produced. The paper is about aircraft manufacturing economics and says nothing about energy. It nonetheless supplies the functional form that eighty years later becomes the central empirical claim in energy-technology forecasting, and it locates that claim firmly in repeated manufacture — the boundary condition that later determines which energy technologies follow the curve and which do not.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Theodore Paul Wright · person · not located
- The experience (learning) curve · phenomenon · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes
Establishes that unit production cost falls by a roughly constant proportion with each doubling of cumulative output — the relationship later called Wright's law and applied to energy technologies. V55 verification basis: neither WebSearch nor WebFetch was available in this session; the citation and its content are stated from author knowledge of the paper as it is cited throughout the technology-learning literature, and the page range is deliberately omitted because it could not be confirmed.
Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences · 1936 · Partly verified
T. P. Wright, Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, volume 3, 1936
Recorded on Theodore Paul Wright
- Wright publishes the airframe cost-quantity relationship
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Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.