Jerome Pearson, President of STAR, Inc., conceived the idea of the space elevator in 1969 at the NASA Ames Research Center, and perfected the concept in the early 1970s, when he was at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio. He published his ideas in an international journal that first brought the idea to the attention of the entire world of spaceflight researchers. Sir Arthur Clarke, living in Sri Lanka, consulted with Pearson in the late 1970s in writing his novel, "The Fountains of Paradise," which brought Pearson’s idea of the space elevator to an even larger audience. Sir Arthur included in the book an appendix that credited Pearson.

The idea of a "stairway to heaven" is as old as the Bible, and includes the Tower of Babel and Jacob’s Ladder. Modern thought on space elevators goes back to Konstantin Tsiolkovski, a school teacher in St. Petersburg, Russia, who did a "thought experiment" on a tower into space. Tsiolkovski imagined tall towers and cosmic railways, and discovered what we now call the geostationary altitude for a spacecraft, at which point the gravitational and centrifugal forces on a body in a one-day orbit are in balance. Tsiolkovski calculated the synchronous altitudes for the five visible planets, and the sun, but concluded that building such a real tower into orbit was impossible.

In the 1960s, Leningrad engineer Yuri Artsutanov discovered how to build a real structure for the space elevator, but published no technical papers; his ideas appeared in a Sunday supplement to Pravda, and their significance was not recognized in the West. In 1966, a group of oceanographers led by John Isaacs at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, again discovered the concept. But they proposed such a thin wire that it would be cut by micro-meteorites almost instantly, and was therefore completely impractical. Two other near-discoveries were by Sutton and Diederich in 1967 and Collar and Flower in 1969, who proposed lowering a stationary satellite on a long cable, but they did not extend this to the space elevator.

Pearson, unaware of the earlier work, independently discovered the concept, but published it in the international journal Acta Astronautica, and thus gave the space elevator to the international aerospace community for the first time. His discovery included using the space elevator for zero-net-energy space launching, and for launching payloads from the elevator tip to reach other planets without requiring rockets. He also was first examine the dynamics of actually lifting payloads up the elevator, and found limitations on the speeds of ascent, akin to the critical velocities of a rotating shaft and the periodic loads from soldiers marching on a bridge.

Hans Moravec had been thinking along similar lines, and seeing the Pearson orbital tower publication led him to propose rotating space towers unconnected to a planet or moon, for catching and throwing space payloads to different orbits. Artsutanov had also proposed this concept in 1969, but it was not known to Moravec.

Pearson later extended the space elevator idea to the moon, using the Lagrangian points as balance points in lieu of the geostationary orbit, and discovered that such a "lunar anchored satellite" could be used to bring lunar materials into high Earth orbit cheaply. Pearson published the first paper on the  lunar space elevator concept at the 1977 L5 Society Conference in London, and then published his journal article in March of 1979.  Interestingly, Artsutanov published a paper on a lunar space elevator just one month later, without either author being aware of the other!