It took somewhere between 1500 and 1700 years from the time the first steam engine (aeolipile) showed up until it was practically applied.
That's not what I mean. That was the time between when someone came up with a cute toy and when someone starting trying to do something useful with it. I'm talking about how long we've had an active fusion energy program spending large amounts of money every year to try to create something practical. When they started out, they thought they could have something in ten years. Ten years after that, they thought they could have something working in ten years. Ten years after that, they STILL thought it was about ten years away. Sixty some years and billions of dollars later, even the optimists are saying it's 20 years away.
Besides, you demonstrated my point exactly. Centuries before anyone tried to develop a steam engine into a useful device, they already had a working proof of concept.
One other thing to keep in mind is that fusion, if we can find a way to make it work, could potentially outshine every other technological achievement in human history up to this point because of the possible applications.
Why do you think that? What's so amazing about fusion that makes it so much better than every other technological achievement in history? Sure, it would solve all our energy problems for about a thousand years, at which point we would have burned through most of the available fuel because, having no incentive for efficiency, we would have wasted most of it. (Yes, I'm cynical about humanity.) But solar energy is equally capable of solving all our energy problems. And unlike fusion, it's a real technology that actually works today.