Going up?

Space elevators?
It reads a bit like science fiction, but the proposal to build an elevator to space – which is science fiction right now – is an intriguing concept.
The idea, as I understand it, is to run an 8.000-mile-long piece of - for the lack of a better term - carbon-fiber rope up into geostationary orbit around the earth. Then using the rope, you haul things up and down to space. Great idea, but how the heck are they going to get that long string out to somewhere in space.?
Look, I know that engineers have a long history of stringing long pieces of wire together to make very strong structures. Just look at suspension bridges like the Gold Gate Bridge. There are thousands upon thousands of miles of wire twisted into giant cables that hold those bridges up. It is not rocket science, but getting a wire like that into space seems to me that it will take a whole lot of rocket science.
How would you do it? I haven’t a clue. Do you take the wire up into space and then dangle it back down or do you try to tow it up into space? Do you have any idea how much weight that would be? Lordy, it would be more than any rocket we now have even on the design boards.
I think it is a great idea, and I volunteer to be the elevator man that runs the car up and down. For you younger people, elevators used to have operators who ran the elevators in most big buildings, instead of just pushing a button for the floor you want.
Pappy told me a great story about an elevator man he met in Kansas City about 70 years ago. It seems that Pappy was checking into a hotel there in the evening and just as the elevator car came to take him up to his floor, these two big bodyguard types with a rather inebriated fellow slung between them came rolling up. The elevator man looked at Pappy and said, “One moment, sir, I will be right back” and then whisked the trio up to the top floor. When he got back, the elevator man – being quite a gentleman about it, Pappy said – apologized to Pappy and said, “You know, of course, who that was?” Pappy admitted his ignorance. The elevator man said, “Why that was Senator Truman.” (As in Harry S. Truman, the Pendergast machine hack politician who would become president of the United States in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt died.)
Elevator operators got to meet the most interesting of folks. Too bad we are so automated these days we don’t need them any more.