Usefulness is in the eye of the beholders. We know much more trivia about the material properties of silicon, prime number sieves, and lithium chemistry... only

Usefulness is in the eye of the beholders. We know much more trivia about the material properties of silicon, prime number sieves, and lithium chemistry... only now it's not considered trivia, it's valuable knowledge. Many discoveries are random luck, many are hard focused work, and some are both. Their value is rarely known at the time and is likely reflexive (e.g. Silicon became the default because it was better known, and similarly prime numbers rather than elliptic curves). Neither would be all that relevant without the markets for semiconductors or public key cryptography. For that reason, I wouldn't discount those first implementer/inventors that popularized solutions that became profitable. Without them there would not have been the investment in continued later focused development required to make those solutions "win" and elevate trivia to relevance. Now adtech on the other hand...