Introduced in Star Trek: The Original Series in 1966, the transporter had predecessors in teleportation devices in other science fiction stories, such as the 1939 serial Buck Rogers.

[citation needed] The name and similar concepts have made their way to later science fiction scenarios, in literature (such as the Thousand Cultures series), games (SimEarth), etc.

Creator Gene Roddenberry's original plan did not include transporters, instead calling for characters to land the starship itself.

However, this would have required unfeasible and unaffordable (for the 1960s) sets and model filming, as well as episode running time spent while landing, taking off, etc.

In "Chosen Realm", a group of alien religious extremists who hijack the ship is unaware of it to the point that when Archer insists on sacrificing a crew member and claims that the device disintegrates matter rather than teleporting it, he is unhesitatingly taken at his word.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual claims that the devices transport objects in real time, accurate to the quantum level.

The TOS episode "Obsession" however, appears to indicate that the transporters' maximum range, during that time period in Star Trek history, is actually around 30,000 kilometers.

The TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon" mentions Vendikar materializing fusion bombs over targets of enemy planet Eminiar VII in the course of theoretical computer warfare.

Klingon transporters, as seen in Star Trek III, have a harsh red light in contrast to Federation blue, and operate with complete silence (in the movie, no sound effects).

Transporter operations can also be curtailed when either the point of origin and/or the intended target site is moving at warp velocities.

To deposit an away team on the planet Gravesworld while at the same time responding to a distress signal, the Enterprise would only drop out of warp drive just long enough to energize the transporter beam.

Geordi La Forge personally performed the delicate operation, which involved compensating for the ship's relativistic motion.

On the other hand, if only the information were beamed up, one could imagine combining it with atoms that might be stored aboard a starship and making as many copies as wanted of an individual.

This was demonstrated in Star Trek's 1979 film debut, Star Trek: The Motion Picture when a malfunction in the transporter sensor circuits resulted in insufficient signal being present at the Enterprise end to successfully rematerialize the two subjects, and Starfleet was unable to pull them back to where they had dematerialized from.

In the episode "Realm of Fear", Geordi La Forge states that there have been no more than two or three transporter accidents in the preceding ten years.

In the Voyager episode "Tuvix", a transporter accident combines both the physical and behavioral aspects of Lt. Tuvok and Neelix into a single being wearing a melange of each other's clothing.

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Vice Admiral James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Saavik carry on a conversation during rematerialization.

In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Dr. Gillian Taylor jumps into Kirk's transporter beam during dematerialization, and rematerializes without any apparent ill effects.

This is probably due to the "annular confinement beam", a component of the transporter mentioned in the various television episodes which serves to keep patterns separate from one another.

In addition, the six circles on the platform are generally used as targets for the subjects to stand on, but they do not appear to represent any limitation of the hardware to six or fewer people.

For special effects reasons, in TOS, people generally appear immobilized during transport, with the exception of Kirk in the episode "That Which Survives".

The closest actual phrase, "Scotty, beam me up", was spoken by Admiral Kirk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).

In August 2008, physicist Michio Kaku predicted in Discovery Channel Magazine that a teleportation device similar to those in Star Trek would be invented within 100 years.

[9] Physics students at University of Leicester calculated that to "beam up" just the genetic information of a single human cell (not the positions of the atoms, just the gene sequences) together with a "brain state" would take 4,850 trillion years assuming a 30 gigahertz microwave bandwidth.

[10] A study by Eric Davis for the US Air Force Research Laboratory of speculative teleportation technologies showed that to dematerialize a human body by heating it up to a million times the temperature of the core of the sun so that the quarks lose their binding energy and become massless and can be beamed at the speed of light in the closest physics equivalent to the Star Trek teleportation scenario would require the equivalent of 330 megatons of energy.