Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, this blundering about approach only works if almost anything could have worked and so you just keep trying until you hit upon it. You can discover that eating one of the dozen types of plants growing on the hillside nearby treats toothache without any overarching theory about how that could work, just try eating stuff and see what happens - but you aren't going to invent the LED lamp this way. Example: When…
I think that your fundamental premise is wrong: there've been a large number of ancient / preindustrial inventions which were not obvious, which were terrifically surprising, or which required a tremendous amount of skill or craft to accomplish. It'd be interesting to come up with a catalogue of these.... Your transoceanic cable example is an interesting one, as the first electrical / telegraph cables greatly expande…
Sometimes it's surprising what nobody was interested in inventing. I think Grace Hopper is really important because people were resistant to the idea that programming the computer involved boring mindless steps which could be done by a machine and so of course instead of hand writing the program in machine code you should write a higher level language and have the machine translate that. It's incredible now, but this very idea was once an important invention and yet her superiors were not enthusiastic.