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"Evelyn Akeley's... accomplishments during World War II were exceeded only by those of her students, who broke virtually every Japanese army code they encountered.
"James Lovell... 'the [American] Revolution's one-man National Security Agency.' His pioneering work as a codebreaker and codemaker gave cryptology a singular role in the emergence of our new Nation. Leveraging Lovell's decrypts, George Washington knew of the approach of a British relief force and was able to warn his French allies, thus enabling a decisive victory at Yorktown."
AES largely gained popularity in part by the NSA adopting it into the "Suite B Crypto" program. The NSA also helped strengthen and develop DSA & SHA during it's early years.
I think lots of people have this idea that everybody thought DES was fine and so the reality of attacks on DES was astonishing, therefore AES won't be any better we're just in the dark somehow. That's just not true, DES was known to be purposefully weak, good enough but not actually good. 56-bit keys and 64-bit block sizes - you can't brute force that with a computer you can buy from the store, but it's not ludicrous and clearly somebody with government money can do it eventually. AES makes those numbers enough bigger that you just can't break it this way.