If Hitler hadn't been born, you would still have Mussolini and Stalin.

If Edison had succeeded, we could never have had anything like a national grid because DC transmission was too inefficient until long after the invention of the transistor.

Einstein was only one of several scientists working on theoretical physics near the turn of the 20th century; he didn't go from cave painting to special relativity all on his own.

The rest of your examples have nothing to do with scientific advancement.

You should read What Technology Wants. The first chapter or two contains a few leaps of logic, but the rest of the book makes a compelling case for emergent behavior leading to most of our scientific results.