[4] The use of the term teleport to describe the hypothetical movement of material objects between one place and another without physically traversing the distance between them has been documented as early as 1878.
[5][6] American writer Charles Fort is credited with having coined the word teleportation in 1931[7][8] to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected.
The earliest recorded story of a "matter transmitter" was Edward Page Mitchell's "The Man Without a Body" in 1877.
[12] The Catholic Saint Padre Pio has documented miracles of Bilocation including a vision received by Pope John Paul II.
Teleportation illusions have featured in live performances throughout history, often under the fiction of miracles, psychic phenomenon, or magic.
A common trick of close-up magic is the apparent teleportation of a small object, such as a marked playing card, which can involve sleight-of-hand, misdirection, and pickpocketing.
[14] Theatres provided greater control of the environment and viewing angles for more elaborate illusions, and teleportation tricks grew in scale and ambition.
[21][22] In 2014, researcher Ronald Hanson and colleagues from the Technical University Delft in the Netherlands, demonstrated the teleportation of information between two entangled quantumbits three metres apart.