But there's also a place for big science. Manhattan project, Apollo program, Soviet industrialization.
But looking at light through slits, firing atoms through foil, falling apples and making tiny sparks using dynamos made those all possible.
You'll also notice those were all government funded defense programs - and are hence a special case with the final one not being effective.
Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.
That's why they were making fast progress - any idiot who doesn't work will increase performance 100% by getting a job.
Just because you take hundreds of millions of people that aren't working and starving to death to working and still starving to death - doesn't mean you did anything particularly useful.
It just means you really fucked things up. China's real growth began with capitalist reform. So did Russias.
Nonworking -> working can describe early soviet industrialization, but it was far more impressive than you're making out - they were first in space for everything up till 69.
Also, going from the everyday puddling to big science projects can also be described as nonworking->working. If government taxes landowners more thoroughly and invests in big science instead, you can consider that as nw->w.