I wish I was better acquainted with the history of ideas. Certainly there are insights that in retrospect are so broadly useful that they must have resolved many seemingly separate confusions when they were first developed, for example logic, Bayesian updating, expected utility maximization, computation as a mathematical abstraction, information theory. But I'm not sure how their inventors came up with them. Were they were deliberately seeking to solve multiple problems with a single insight, or at least had the multiple relevant problems in the back of their minds? Maybe somebody more familiar with the history can help with the answer?