Even the first toilets were far from successful. Indoor plumbing required a whole industry and multiple compounding innovations to become successful.
Many people were working on flying machines. The Wright brothers simply got lucky in timing: internal combustion engines finally got reliable and useful enough for the idea to work. If they hadn't done it someone else would have within the following 5-10 years (and many others were in fact trying at the time).
Many people had MP3 players but none of them managed to design a product ordinary people would want to use, nor the muscle to make the record industry play ball with an online store. You can scream until you're blue in the face that Apple didn't invent MP3 players but that just makes you irrelevant and a bad potential founder/employee.
I would argue that most truly ground-breaking innovations do not result in a wildly successful business. Finding a way to pair ideas with execution and product-market fit are more important.