There's an argument that some technologies only make sense in a particular context and so if you invent that technology without the context it dies out.
IIRC Writing died out several times, some specialists would see the value in recording language "permanently" and embrace the invention but nobody else did, then circumstances result in this group dying out or at least being dispersed and the ability is lost again.
There are some edge cases too. The invention of radio almost doesn't make sense, because they didn't yet understand enough about electromagnetism to make anything resembling a modern radio transmitter. The "spark gap" radio transmitter invented was totally crazy (in modern terms it's basically a broadband jammer and thus illegal), but if nobody else has a radio transmitter then it's all you've got. If that technology was slightly worse (say the maximum range is a hundred times worse or getting the transmitter working is not merely tricky to learn but such an art that few can do it reliably even with practice) it wouldn't be useful and would have gone nowhere until the electromagnetic theory gets better and valves are invented.
The Alexanderson alternator was an intermediate technology between the spark gap transmitters and tubes. Unlike the spark gaps transmitters, it produced a more spectrally clean waveform, but only at modest frequencies (up to 600 kHz, according to the Wikipedia page).
IIRC Writing died out several times, some specialists would see the value in recording language "permanently" and embrace the invention but nobody else did, then circumstances result in this group dying out or at least being dispersed and the ability is lost again.
There are some edge cases too. The invention of radio almost doesn't make sense, because they didn't yet understand enough about electromagnetism to make anything resembling a modern radio transmitter. The "spark gap" radio transmitter invented was totally crazy (in modern terms it's basically a broadband jammer and thus illegal), but if nobody else has a radio transmitter then it's all you've got. If that technology was slightly worse (say the maximum range is a hundred times worse or getting the transmitter working is not merely tricky to learn but such an art that few can do it reliably even with practice) it wouldn't be useful and would have gone nowhere until the electromagnetic theory gets better and valves are invented.