5. Nobel Prize in Physics (2000)  awarded to Herbert Kroemer for: "Developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and opto-electronics"

href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2000/kroemer-bio.html" target="_blank">Rejection: href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2000/kroemer-bio.html">Rejection:  "I wrote up the idea and submitted the paper to Applied Physics Letters, where it was rejected. I was talked into not fighting the rejection, but to submit it to the Proceedings of the IEEE, where it was published, but ignored. I also wrote a patent, which is probably a better paper than the one in Proc. IEEE."