Monomolecular wire

[1] Among the earliest descriptions of a super-strong filament are the film The Man in the White Suit, in which a scientist develops a monofilament cloth fibre that will never wear out, and Theodore Sturgeon's "The Incubi of Parallel X" (Planet Stories, Sep 1951),[2] where a "molecularly condensed fibre" is used as a zipline.

[3] An early example of a material similar to monomolecular wire deliberately used as a weapon and cutting tool is "borazon-tungsten filament" in G. Randall Garrett's "Thin Edge".

(Analog, Dec 1963)[4] The main character uses a strand from an asteroid towing-cable to cut jail bars and to booby-trap the door of his room.

Many later writers, including John Brunner, Frank Herbert, William Gibson and George R. R. Martin, have also used monomolecular or similar wire as a weapon or tool.

Although there were a few earlier scientific papers suggesting the concept, a fully realized space elevator was first described in 1979 in Arthur Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise and Charles Sheffield's The Web Between the Worlds.