Have you ever thought you would change the world? Have you ever read something from decades ago that saw so clearly into the future that it could have been written yesterday? The hero of our story did change the world and wrote an article for Scientific American that laid out the same case for digital privacy that we deal with today, in 1973. This is the story of the beginning of how the Internet got the cryptography tools we have today, and turbulent road it took. This is the first of a five episode series on the development, use, and failures of cryptography that brought us to the privacy tools we use every day.