Yes, this is a classic story. Crystal diodes were known prior to WWII, and produced in bulk during WWII for radar systems. That resulted in commercial crystal growing technology. Bell Labs and Western Electric did much of that, so the technology for making crystals with controlled properties was coming along. That's the first step in the process of making transistors and ICs.
The first big technology that really required theory and heavy math was AC power. That's what Tesla was noted for. DC you can do with ordinary arithmetic, but AC rotary machine design requires calculus. That was a big shock to engineers of the era. Edison never made that transition.
Up until the early 20th century, science and engineering didn't talk much.
While you don't need any math to have an intuitive understanding of how steam engines work, you need to understand thermodynamics in order to engineer efficient engines, which is what happened in the latter part of the 19th century. The development of the science of thermodynamics was greatly stimulated by its applications, and vice-versa.
I imagine there is a similar story in chemical engineering.
I had an interesting realisation a year or two back: coal and petroleum each saw a major boom first in use-as-fuel, and then a secondary realisation of the chemical properties and utility of the substances. First coal-tar chemistry in the 1850s and 1860s (or thereabouts), then synthetics, in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly.
Virtually all modern synthetic plastics (urethane, polyethelyne, PVC, Nylon, etc.) were invented in the 1930s.
This also plays out in how eras appear to us. For clothing from -2 million bce - 1890, you had leather, cotton, flax, wool, silk, and fur, plus in areas woven grasses and other materials, with the plant fibres being vastly less expensive.
(Many of these were also fairly recent discoveries -- knitting, as an example, didn't exist until the Mediaeval period, and weaving progressed massively from ~1 AD through the 19th century).
In the 1890s, the first synthetic viscose came along (essentially rayon I believe). Then nylon and such in the 1930s, with the first synthetics. Even through the 1950s, virtually all high-fashion clothing was wool, silk, or fur, but the first synthetics, many in athletic or mountaineering wear, began to appear, with an explosion in the 1960s of synthetics and dyes, giving the characteristic look of the 1960s and 1970s.
There's been some walking back from all-synthetic-all-the-time, though they remain in high use.
Another thought is on the point you'd made: the interplay of steam power and thermodynamics, with engineering driving science through that period.
I mean it's not like it's one in a millennia. Archimedes, Cauchy, Galileo, Babbage, Lovelace, Maxwell, Ampere, Lord Kelvin, Navier... those are just the famous ones off the top of my head.
I had a crystal radio in the 60's. It was nothing more than an antenna, a coil, headphones, and of course the crystal. I had fooled around with making electromagnets and morse keys, and understood them. But the crystal completely baffled me.
I built one, and it said “connect it to a pipe”. I had a piece of pipe in my room, and it frustratingly did nothing. They never said “an earth connected pipe.
Reading Tesla’s Colorado Springs Lab Notes, he spent a good deal of time trying to develop an efficient RF rectifier/detector. So while he could generate huge amounts of RF, he could not detect it well.
I wish Robert Buderi's book on radar was available in e-print because it's really good as an overview of the relationship of the war, O/R, technology and specifically the transistor.
You’d probably like Invention and Technology magazine. It ceased publication several years ago, but it was awesome. Great reading if you can find old issues.
It would be kind of fun to have a publishing company that would reprint and send out curated old issues of classic magazines to the nostalgia seekers of the world.
While I respect those who feel different like you, personally I’m glad it’s not. I retain significantly more knowledge from things I read vs things I heard. To fully benefit from audio content, I have to dedicate 100% of my focus to it otherwise I miss critical parts.
The first big technology that really required theory and heavy math was AC power. That's what Tesla was noted for. DC you can do with ordinary arithmetic, but AC rotary machine design requires calculus. That was a big shock to engineers of the era. Edison never made that transition.
Up until the early 20th century, science and engineering didn't talk much.