文章以量子密码学先驱 Stephen Wiesner、Charles Bennett 与 Gilles Brassard 的脉络，强调关键时间尺度：Wiesner 的革命性论文近 15 年未发表；Bennett 长达 10 年难以推广其想法，直到在 Puerto Rico 与 Brassard 相遇。两人在海中讨论约 10 分钟便确立后来合作论文的核心构想，将量子「测量扰动」与密码学结合，以修补「量子钞票」只能由发行者验证的可用性缺陷。

BB84 方案于 1983 年提出，让 Alice 与 Bob 无需当面会合即可透过传送并测量光子建立共享秘密金钥；任何窃听都会引入可观测的扰动，且安全性不依赖数学难题的假设。实验端在 1989 年 10 月完成展示，时间点精确对应两人首次相遇后 10 年；当时只在 30 公分（0.30 m）的距离实现量子金钥分配，而更近期的卫星链路已把同一方法扩展到超过 1,000 公里（原数 1,000 km）。

其后里程碑包括 1993 年 Bennett、Brassard 与另外 4 名研究者发表纠缠「量子传态」论文，传递的是量子态资讯而非物质，并将纠缠作为资讯处理资源。1994 年 Peter Shor 提出可快速质因数分解的量子演算法，削弱传统加密对「难分解」的依赖，反而凸显不靠数学假设的量子加密重要性；自 Shor 结果以来的 30 年，量子资讯科学的兴趣与投资呈爆发式上升，量子密码学的适用范围也因近年的新工作而被认为可能显著扩张。

The context traces quantum cryptography’s origins through Stephen Wiesner, Charles Bennett, and Gilles Brassard, highlighting key timescales: Wiesner’s revolutionary paper stayed unpublished for nearly 15 years, and Bennett spent about 10 years unsuccessfully trying to interest others until meeting Brassard in Puerto Rico. In roughly 10 minutes of discussion in the ocean, they settled core ideas that merged quantum “measurement disturbance” with cryptographic techniques to fix a usability flaw in quantum money—only the creator could verify a bill.

In 1983 Bennett and Brassard proposed BB84, where Alice and Bob create a shared secret key by sending and measuring photons, avoiding any in-person meeting. Any eavesdropping necessarily disturbs the quantum signals in detectable ways, and the security does not rely on unproven mathematical assumptions. An improvised experiment finally worked in October 1989, exactly 10 years after their first meeting, demonstrating quantum key distribution over 30 centimeters (0.30 m); later satellite-link demonstrations extended the same method to more than 1,000 kilometers (original 1,000 km).

Further milestones include a 1993 paper by Bennett, Brassard, and four other researchers that used entanglement to “teleport” a quantum state—transmitting information, not matter—and helped establish entanglement as an information-processing resource. In 1994 Peter Shor introduced a quantum factoring algorithm that could rapidly break the hardness assumption underlying much digital encryption, strengthening the case for quantum encryption methods that do not depend on mathematical difficulty. Over the 30 years since Shor’s result, interest and investment in quantum information science have surged, and recent work suggests quantum cryptography’s scope may be significantly broader than a few niche tasks like key distribution.