Getting from rooms full of vacuum tubes to surface mount technology (SMT) on a postage stamp sized pcb is a good example of it. And we're doing the same thing with quantum computing today, since when most of quantum computing concepts were developed, there was no possible way for them to be developed into actual machines. Now we have several variant solutions all vying to be the one that first realizes the concepts usefully.
Also, propellers are really just very short but wide screws with all the extraneous weight removed. I don't know why they don't get discussed as such for this use case.