But it is really like that. It depends on the groundwork that's there, technical capabilities and tooling. Once that's in place it only takes a lucky guy to pluck the discovery out of the air.

Consider dual-space methods in crystallography. Herb Hauptman is credited with the discovery. My undergraduate advisor obliquely mentioned that he had done something similar in 1986 - obtain atom positions from direct methods, then do a few cycles of tangent refinement from the highest peaks. It reduces map noise considerably.

Computers were simply too slow at that time to use this as a general method of solving 1000-atom structures, so the approach remained an afterthought. But the possibilities were noted once the computing power was there.

It is like that. But simply discoveries being delayed could delay technical advancement for decades and even centuries in the long run.

The problem is, that lucky guy can take an indefinitely long time to show up.

I heard recently about the Scythe Project. Apparently, the scythe was never invented in some places, including India. That's a long time for the lucky guy to never show up.

According to Wikipedia [1], the transistor was independently rediscovered by two German physicists just a year later (1948).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor#History