Information theory is a great example of this. You can find some nice articles around talking about the history of it. Basically Shannon lived with the details that would come to be abstracted by information theory for years and he felt there was some general way to describe it all, but it took him considerable effort to figure it out, and it was very much non-obvious that there was a good unifying abstraction or what it would look like before it was complete. Now the short paper that introduced information theory remains one of the most widely read academic papers of all time, and much of our world would be much harder to reason about without this abstraction (in fact, it’s hard to even wrap your mind around what it must have been like not to have this theory now that you’ve grown up in a world suffuse with it).
Information theory is a great example of this. You can find some nice articles around talking about the history of it. Basically Shannon lived with the details that would come to be abstracted by information theory for years and he felt there was some general way to describe it all, but it took him considerable effort to figure it out, and it was very much non-obvious that there was a good unifying abstraction or what it would look like before it was complete. Now the short paper that introduced information theory remains one of the most widely read academic papers of all time, and much of our world would be much harder to reason about without this abstraction (in fact, it’s hard to even wrap your mind around what it must have been like not to have this theory now that you’ve grown up in a world suffuse with it).