Our objective here is to provide a brief—hence necessarily incomplete—chronological overview of the key ideas from both high-energy physics and Teichmüller theory that contributed to the emergence of spectral networks. We will highlight how these two fields have mutually enriched one another, with concepts from one often paving the way for entirely new research directions in the other, sometimes developing independently, but more recently converging through the framework of spectral networks. We begin by discussing significant aspects of quantum field theory, a framework for describing quantum relativistic phenomena, focusing on the crucial introduction of Yang–Mills theories and the discovery of instantons. Next, we shift to the mathematical field of gauge theories, which emerged from the study of instantons in Yang–Mills theories. We will also explore how higher-rank Teichmüller theory evolved from the study of gauge theories, significantly generalizing the classical notion of Teichmüller space. In the third section, we examine aspects of supersymmetric quantum field theories, primarily as a fruitful working assumption that enables the exploration of deep aspects of quantum field theories that might otherwise have remained inaccessible. We will particularly emphasize electric-magnetic duality, which has motivated the investigation of BPS states in four-dimensional quantum field theories with extended supersymmetry, as well as the development of Seiberg–Witten theory. Finally, we discuss how string-theoretic techniques have broadened the class of theories amenable to Seiberg–Witten analysis and systematized methods for studying such theories. This has led, in particular, to a large class of theories known as theories of class \(\mathcal S\) , in which Hitchin systems play a central role. The investigation of BPS states within these theories has revealed unexpected connections with the theory of Hitchin components, important examples of higher-rank Teichmüller spaces, and has ultimately contributed to the development of spectral networks, which have rapidly gained considerable interest in the study of higher-rank Teichmüller spaces.