James Ellis
lorecryptography
The GCHQ researcher who conceived non-secret encryption around 1969-70, several years before the public discovery of public-key cryptography, and could tell nobody.
The idea existed inside a British intelligence agency and did nothing, because a classified insight changes no protocol, ships in no product and teaches no one. The comparison is the argument for open research stated as an experiment that actually ran: two groups had the same idea, one could publish and one could not, and the entire public-key infrastructure descends from the one that could. Recognition came only after declassification in the late 1990s, by which time he had died.
Also known as: ellis, non-secret encryption