One of the interesting things, as I understand it, is that while Harrison's chronometer certainly worked well it wasn't widely deployed because of its cost. It was mostly after much cheaper chronometers were developed that they became more or less universally used.
Another example of "wasn't widely deployed because of its cost" is the Kalthoff 30-Shot Flintlock from 1659. Here is a video from Forgotten Weapons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghKrbNpqQoY
I'm starting to see Henry Maudslay's screw cutting lathe (1800) as a turning point. Before it, inventors could invent really cool devices, and carefully hand make one or a few, but they would be too expensive. Then machine tools made shaping metal cheaper. That included shaping metal to make machine tools. So costs fell and fell, and eventually all sorts of things became cheap enough for wide deployment.
That is scary, because the "right time" to invent something depends on the capabilities of production machinery setting the production cost. As an inventor, one likes to think of success of the inventing lying in ones own hands, but there is an ecosystem of production machinery that has an out sized say in how much your invention will cost to mass produce. It can even veto an excellent invention by saying "Not yet!".
A lot of Maudslay's (and Brunel's) innovation came down to process even through the idea of standardized parts probably dated back to the French General Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval a number of decades earlier.
As you say, this subsequently applied in the case of flintlocks.
But, yeah, everything exists as part of an ecosystem and if you're not at the right time, your brilliant idea probably won't fly. I've been an IT analyst off and on for many years and I've seen this happen often.
