The effect is named after the German physicist Johannes Stark, who discovered it in 1913. It was independently discovered in the same year by the Italian physicist Antonino Lo Surdo, and in Italy it is thus sometimes called the Stark–Lo Surdo effect. The discovery of this effect contributed importantly to the development of quantum theory and Stark was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics in the year 1919.
Inspired by the magnetic Zeeman effect, and especially by Hendrik Lorentz's explanation of it, Woldemar Voigt performed classical mechanical calculations of quasi-elastically bound electrons in an electric field. By using experimental indices of refraction he gave an estimate of the Stark splittings. This estimate was a few orders of magnitude too low. Not deterred by this prediction, Stark undertook measurements on excited states of the hydrogen atom and succeeded in observing splittings.
By the use of the Bohr–Sommerfeld ("old") quantum theory, Paul Epstein and Karl Schwarzschild were independently able to derive equations for the linear and quadratic Stark effect in hydrogen. Four years later, Hendrik Kramers derived formulas for intensities of spectral transitions. Kramers also included the effect of fine structure, with corrections for relativistic kinetic energy and coupling between electron spin and orbital motion. The first quantum mechanical treatment (in the framework of Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics) was by Wolfgang Pauli. Erwin Schrödinger discussed at length the Stark effect in his  third paper on quantum theory (in which he introduced his perturbation theory), once in the manner of the 1916 work of Epstein (but generalized from the old to the new quantum theory) and once by his (first-order) perturbation approach.
Finally, Epstein reconsidered the linear and quadratic Stark effect from the point of view of the new quantum theory. He derived equations for the line intensities which were a decided improvement over Kramers's results obtained by the old quantum theory.
While the first-order-perturbation (linear) Stark effect in hydrogen is in agreement with both the old Bohr–Sommerfeld model and the quantum-mechanical theory of the atom, higher-order corrections are not. Measurements of the Stark effect under high field strengths confirmed the correctness of the new quantum theory.