"When Ralph [Merkle] had to do a term project in CS 244 in the fall of 1974, he proposed 'secure communication over insecure channels' (the privacy part of public key cryptography), but the professor wrote: 'Project 2 [a much more mundane proposal] looks more reasonable, maybe because your description of Project 1 [the privacy part of PKC] is muddled terribly.'
Merkle dropped the course and pursued public key distribution on his own.
When Ralph submitted an early version of the paper to Communications, it was rejected with the editor telling him in an Oct. 22, 1975 letter, “I … was particularly bothered by the fact that there are no references to the literature. Has anyone else ever investigated this approach?”4 Partially in the editor’s defense, Ralph should have included references, as he did in the final version of the article that appeared three years later.
The editor was also hindered by the reviewer on whom she relied. The reviewer recommended rejecting the paper because it 'is not in the mainstream of present cryptography thinking.' He was right. It was totally new and groundbreaking."
He also has a section entitled "The Wisdom of Foolishness", giving his discoveries and the discoveries of TCP/IP, GPS, DSL, microprocessors, and others as examples.