Gordon Moore studied the number of transistors in circuits manufactured at Fairchild Semiconductors and found that their number had doubled each year. A single transistor in 1959 had become 64 in 1965. Since I had never heard of Wright`s Law, I decided to check it out. It seems that very few people other than MIT researchers call Theodore “TP” Wright`s discovery “Wright`s law,” but many people are familiar with his learning curve (or experience curve) in which cumulative coin production is plotted relative to price per unit. Wright found that progress increases with experience: every percentage increase in cumulative output in a given industry leads to a fixed percentage improvement in production efficiency. He noticed this during the study of aircraft manufacturing – for each doubling of aircraft production, the amount of work was reduced by 10-15%. He published his findings in 1936 in an article in the Journal of Aeronautical Sciences entitled: Factors That Affect the Cost of Aircraft. Lithium-ion batteries provide a good case study that highlights the advantage of using Wright`s Law over Moore`s Law. Based on Moore`s Law and as the graph shows, most analysts would conclude that lithium-ion batteries matured in 2005.
After two decades of average decline of about 10% per year, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has stabilized. However, these 10% declines have pushed the unit cost of lithium-ion batteries above a critical threshold, enabling large-scale production of electric vehicles. An electric vehicle with a range of 200+ miles has as much battery power as 5,000 iPhones, so if only 1% of car sales switched from gasoline to electric, they would more than double the demand for batteries compared to those needed for smartphones worldwide. Given that batteries were close to this tipping point, analysts could have predicted that the time it takes to cumulatively double production would drop sharply and that cost decline would accelerate again, as shown in the charts below. Lower prices have opened up new segments of the automotive lithium-ion battery market, which in turn is pushing them into an even larger market, large-scale energy storage. Since 1971, the number has doubled every two years, and transistors on a circuit are now an incredible 19.2 billion. Wright`s law comes from an observation by Theodore P. Wright, an aerospace engineer, who found that for every cumulative doubling of aircraft production, costs decreased by about 20%. This is also known as the learning curve or experience curve. You must like the title of Gordon Moore`s original 1965 article: Stopmming more components on integrated circuits. This hardly sounds like stuffy science! All the digital things we have around us are possible thanks to this development – consumer electronics, supercomputers, personal computers, mobile phones, internet, smartphones, big data, augmented reality, drones and virtual reality. Wright points to three times when America could have done it right, but didn`t for a variety of reasons.
Editor`s note: This story has been edited to clarify Jeffrey Wright`s naval service. For Americans, Mrs. Wright was interesting because of his patriotism, which amounted to a passion. Wright said the reason for its success, particularly in Asia, “is the fact that we maintain local publications that allow us to connect with a wider range of partner publications regionally.” When he returned to his hotel, he found a letter on his desk written in Gordon Wright`s handwriting. The researchers made a statement that is very similar to what we at Objective Analysis tell our customers and potential customers. They said they hoped their realization “will lead to a clearer vision of future possibilities and, ultimately, better decisions.” We pride ourselves on producing industry forecasts that bring financial benefits to our clients. Please contact us if you would like to know how we can help you. If the production cost of 1000 units is $100, then the cost of unit number 2000 is $80. Unit number 4000 costs $64 and number 8000 costs $51. By his operation, Gordon Wright, the most reasonable man of our knowledge, is reduced to the level of childhood! With Wright staining, it can be produced by longer staining and less washing than for the usual blood stain.
Understanding Moore`s Law won`t allow you to predict exactly which devices will arrive, but you can understand what can be achieved. The actual percentage reduction varies by industry and product, but remains relatively constant over time. Therefore, it can be used as a rule of thumb to look to the future. MIT recently announced that a team of researchers from MIT and the Santa Fe Institute has tested a number of predictive methods to determine that two stand out in particular. The findings were published in an online article entitled Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress. So far, only about 3.5 million electric cars have been produced, compared to 2.5 billion cars with internal combustion engines. We will therefore see a rapid reduction in costs as the number of electric cars increases sharply in the coming years. The MIT research, based on 61 price and performance datasets over at least 10 years, is part of an ongoing project by the Santa Fe Institute, which published a paper in 2010 with the same result.
One of the authors (Jessika Trancik) moved from the Santa Fe Institute to MIT and continued her research there, so MIT published the results. Yet enthusiasts describe the airborne exercises planned by Ingenuity as nothing less than a Wright brothers` moment — the first powered flight of an airplane on a planet other than Earth. Of the two, Wright`s law was found to be slightly more accurate than Moore`s law. This cycle, encouraged by subsidies, has been going on for decades and is a good example of a technological trend called Wright`s Law. Theodore Paul Wright, also known as T. P. Wright, was an American aeronautical engineer and educator. Over the course of his career, he has held numerous positions, including Naval Aircraft Inspector, Executive Engineer at Curtiss Aeroplane Company, Chief Engineer at Curtiss-Wright Corporation. He was a member of the National Defence Advisory Committee under President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Deputy Chief of the Aircraft Division in the Office of Production Management, Chairman of the Joint Aircraft Committee, Director of the Office of Aviation Resources Control, and a member of the War Production Board. In studying aircraft manufacturing, Wright found that for every doubling of aircraft production, labor was reduced by 10 to 15 percent. In 1936, he described all his results in the book “Factors Affecting the Cost of Aircraft”. The paper, now known as Wright`s Law, or experience curve effects, describes that “we learn by doing” and that the cost of each unit produced decreases with the cumulative number of units produced.