I find it hard to believe that no one would think og heating food with microwaves in all those years. The accident that happened the first time could also happen again.
Large banks of radar equipment and food doesn’t necessarily mix. But sure, someone else would have eventually discovered the principle. That’s almost always true.
A friend tells me that his father, who probably served in WWII, used to heat up hot dogs and such with the radar equipment. He didn’t say his father invented the idea, rather, that it was something commonly known by the servicemen.
I have to think someone was going to develop cookware from it.
I think someone was more likely to develop a means of re-animating frozen hamsters with it.
Irrelevant in the case of Apple. They wanted a (virtually) all-screen device. Blackberries, etc. already had keyboards taking up half the real estate. Apple clearly wasn’t going for that.
The iPhone was one of the first to use a capacitive touchscreen. That was basically a hard requirement for an on-screen keyboard. Resistive touchscreens were simply not sensitive enough for that application. Most were not multi-touch, either. Resistive worked reasonably well with a stylus, but Apple did not want that, either.
Apple was one of the few companies to recognize that “duct-taping” multiple products together was doomed to fail. They created an integrated product with a unified design aesthetic. All of the pieces fit together. It’s also why the dumbphone manufacturers basically all failed. They had all the same feature tickboxes, so they thought no one would bother with the iPhone. They underestimated the value of a properly integrated product.
While I think this is true–as in, an early genius might be a decade or two ahead of the field, but probably not a lot more–this shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Every invention comes on the shoulders of previous ones. If every invention came a decade late, civilization would be millennia behind where it is today. There are hundreds or thousands of strictly dependent steps (i.e., not ones that can be done simultaneously) between the wheel and a modern commercial jet. And there might have been a few in there that really did require a very specific genius.
Yes, I think it’s both true that most inventions would have been invented not very many years after they actually were, and that the pioneers deserve credit for actually inventing those things (though bearing in mind that most invention is incremental…it’s very rarely, if ever, the lone genius out of the blue).
And, conversely, if everything was invented at the earliest opportunity I’d probably be typing this from a sky city around Saturn 
It’s totally true, though (well, maybe not Saturn). It’s astonishing how much time was wasted through lack of imagination or even willful resistance to progress. Just about every significant invention or discovery had to push through enormous obstacles set up by entrenched players.
It also depends on how much demand there is for an innovation. Babbage invented a mechanical computer a hundred years before they were finally developed. He was trying to solve the problem of producing accurate mathematical tables used for calculation and importantly - navigation. Accurate navigation on the high seas was a strategic objective of states whose economies were based on maritime trade.
Harrison invented the marine chronometer, a precision time piece, to fullfill the same demand for accurate navigation. His invention was more successful and found wide application.
The idea of a computer lay dormant until another national strategic demand arose: the decoding of wartime ciphers that required huge amounts of calculation that could not be done by hand in the time available.
Once the wartime intelligence demand ended, computers found other applications in science research and eventually, in business accounting. Those faltering steps were enabled by the invention of the transistor allowing computers to become fully electronic and more reliable.
Electronic computers then created a demand for a battery technology for mobile applications. This has in turn been successfully scaled up to replace fossil fuel burning internet combustion engines in personal transport electric vehicles.
We are now living through a period when there is a pressing demand for another invention: a battery chemistry suitable for grid storage to address the intermittency problem of renewable energy generation.
Goodness knows how many scientists and inventors have worked on batteries over decades. But demand for storage was less when the problem could be addressed by on-demand generation by burning fossil fuels to run large turbines.
So there is sometimes huge pressure to invent something that addresses a specific need. Conversely there can be significant resistance where an inventions threatens vested interests with large sunk assets. The big car makers resistance to innovation and developing EVs is a recent example.
The economic conditions have to be right for an innovation to obtain traction.
Even when there is huge demand, poor inventors may find they are unprepared for legal bearpit and dirty tricks that awaits them in the business world. Edison, though a gifted inventor himself, was a highly competitive businessman who got up to some appalling behaviour to suppress rivals.
Inventors rarely have the combination of inspiration, perspiration and business acumen to succeed personally. Their timing also has to be right to be the man if the moment. The demand has to be there or else their work becomes little more than a curiosity.
For every Marconi there must have been hundreds of others who tinkered alone and unrecognised in their workshops ahead of their time. Whether they were genius of Babbage or the delusions of the fictitious Frankenstein, their work may be in vain.
Economics and politics plays an important. But culture is also important, so is communication. The sharing of ideas and making connections and applying quite different technologies to new problems.
There are a lot of ingredients there. We go through periods when the factors line up and there are bursts of innovation and long periods of history where change is regarded with deep suspicion.
The achievements of the Classical Greeks were held in such esteem during the Renaissance that it hindered progress. Few would challenge their conclusions because the prevailing culture put a premium on orthodoxy and the established order of things. This held back progress in many fields.
The Greeks enjoyed a remarkable flowering of intellectual progress and much of their writings were lost. It took until the Enlightenment to start building on that. That is a lot of down time when bright new ideas were not welcome and pioneers had to watch their backs lest they make powerful enemies.