Stephen Wiesner
The physicist who invented quantum cryptography around 1970 and then waited more than a decade for anyone to publish it.
As a graduate student at Columbia, Wiesner wrote "Conjugate Coding": information encoded in quantum states using two incompatible bases cannot be read without being disturbed. He proposed two uses — banknotes that cannot be counterfeited ("quantum money") and a way to send two messages of which the receiver can read only one. The journal turned it down, and it finally appeared in 1983 in SIGACT News.
In the meantime Charles Bennett had read the manuscript and, with Gilles Brassard, turned the idea into BB84, the first quantum key distribution protocol. Wiesner and Bennett later published superdense coding in 1992. Wiesner himself left research and spent many years working construction in Israel.