There's an easy way to test this. Just pick a recent technology for which 1) you don't know the history 2) you don't really know how it works. Look around your room (or your head) and find any random example of recent, remarkable technology...and then check wikipedia. You've got to go roughly recent enough that not everyone was using them before 1990.
Given that sentence, the first technology that springs to mind is wikipedia itself. The crucial step here seems to be the discovery that people actually start editing much more when you give them a wiki interface then when you ask them to send you their contributions via email.
It was an accidental discovery.
Prediction (before doing it): The pattern will emerge that the first crucial step was done by a scientist, and then later it was expanded into something useful by others.
From the outside it's not easy to know what happened to be the crucial step. There are certain things that are obvious when you tinker with a technology. A scientist has probably dealt with the effect years earlier but the engineer might not know about the work of the scientist.
It's quite often that people file patents for stuff that people can later discover independently. As far as the Wikipedia article for Pacemakers goes it's not clear that Mark C Lidwell knew about J A McWilliam or that McWilliams work was crucial for him.
The Wikipedia expertiment only shows you that scientists like to credit themselves and their collegues with advancing technology and that public culture supports them in that quest.
Science is optimized for taking credit for other peoples work. Scientists get payed for being credited. Engineers on the other hand get payed to produce useful technology.
Wikipedia breaks the "it's not immediately obvious how it works even when it's right in front of you" rule. A window does not pass this criteria, but glass passes. Once you have glass, you can expect people to innovate cool ways to use it...but you can't expect people to come up with glass making without any evidence to work from.
The reason for that rule is that scientists only come into the picture where the limiting factor is a lack of knowledge about the world. If it's a clever implementation of existing knowledge (like wikipedia), it's not s...
Science is not particularly reliable.
And yet, we have remarkable technology, and can do medical marvels.
My tentative theory is that there's a lot of knowledge that's less formal than science in engineering, manufacturing, and the practice of medicine which makes it possible to get work done, and some fairly effective methods of filtering information that comes from science.