Electrical and electronic recording and manipulation of music dates back to the early 20th century. By experimenting with playback technology on disks, magnetic wire, and finally tape, folks like Pierre Schaeffer and the Studio d'Essai produced some fascinating works in the 1940s in a style of electroacoustic music called musique concrète. In 1951 Schaeffer's studio was reorganized and funded at Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF) in Paris, where it would host many electronic music pioneeers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis.

Many of the pieces created through these early electroacoustic efforts - which often involved recording sound, cutting and splicing the tape with a magnetized wire, and then re-assembling and recording it - were direct philosophical ancestors to the practices that would give birth to digital electronic music, and forms like techno. When you hear about techniques like sampling today, that was being accomplished in the 1950s by recording, splicing, and re-recording fragments of sound - which found its utility in a number of settings, including providing canned sound effects for television shows, many of which were still recorded live.

Both musical styles and technology were changing rapidly throughout the early-mid 30th century. Acoustic blues became plugged in and amplified with instruments like the electric guitar (invented in 1932), which became a major inspiration for rock & roll; electronic instruments transitioned from the theremin (invented in 1920) to full-blown analog synthesizers (which gained popularity with rock bands in the 1960s). A particular subset of synthesizers was the drum machine, which produced an automated beat - versions of these had existed since the 1930s, but weren't commercially available until the Wurlitzer sideman in 1959.

The 60s and 70s saw increasing refinement in the technical instruments of synthesis, recording, sound manipulation, and mixing; the culture of music continued to experiment and incorporate these new possibilities into the music being produced. The Beatles famously had a revolving speaker on "Revolution no. 9" (1968), and was heavily influenced by musique concrète; multi-track recording helped inspire the craze for "dubbing" in the 60s as well - that is, removing the vocal track from Jamaican reggae recordings to allow others to talk or sing over the music, and recording different mixes of instrumental and vocal tracks on the same record. In the 70s, the release of direct-drive turntables enabled disc jockeys to achieve novel effects by manipulating the record as it was playing; if you had two copies of a record with an instrumental breakbeat, and a turntable which could play two records, a reasonably skilled turntablist could play the beat on one, then crossfade over to the other record as it hit that section, and by going back and forth create a single sustain beat. As with dubbing, the practice became influential in what became hip-hop.

All of these things happened in their own time; it's not that the technology to do many of these things wasn't possible, but it wasn't all widespread (vacuum tubes gave way to transistors, etc.), and it took the development of cultures of people using and incorporating these technologies to create music. Techno didn't emerge fully formed from nothing in the 1980s Detroit; Blues inspired Rock & Roll which inspired dance music like Disco which, combined with fairly available digital drum machines like the Roland TR-808 and increasingly sophisticated and available digital synthesizers and multi-track recording gear made it possible - and even then, there were pioneers like Kraftwerk which were doing that kind of combination of new technology and style in Germany in the late 1970s.

So yeah, you can go back through the history of electronic music and find some stuff that sounds very proto-techno. Pierre Schaeffer's "Étude aux chemins de fer" (1948) isn't exactly a dance beat, but you can hear the beats being created from samples and set together in a musical way.

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Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!