Teleportation

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The word arrived before the physics did by more than sixty years. Charles Hoy Fort, a New Yorker who spent his working life in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library and the British Museum filling shoeboxes with notes on anomalies — falls of frogs, luminous wheels at sea, objects found inside sealed stone — published his third collection, Lo!, in 1931, the year before he died. In its second chapter he announced a hypothesis:

“Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation.”

Fort joined the Greek tele- (at a distance) with the Latin portare (to carry) and applied the result to everything in his notes that seemed to have moved without visible means — ice blocks in summer fields, stones dropping from clear skies, living fish in sealed containers. He did not believe in the supernatural in any conventional sense; he believed in data that official science was refusing to look at. His teleportation was a sorting category, not a mechanism, and he was candid about his own uncertainty: “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.” What the word did was give a name to a class of anomalies that had circulated, unnamed, through the literature of wonders for centuries.

The Tradition the Word Named

The séance room had been producing its own version of the phenomenon since the 1850s, under the older name of the apport: an object — a flower, a stone, a bird — that materialised inside a locked or curtained enclosure during a sitting, apparently passing through solid matter to arrive there. As the sitters told it, the object was simply present when the lights came up, warm and tangible, where nothing had been before. The apport was a staple of Spiritualism’s physical phase, the period in which mediums competed to produce visible, touchable evidence — table-tilts, trumpet-voices in the dark, and finally objects moving across sealed rooms. Spiritualism framed these productions as demonstrations of survival; the objects came, in the medium’s own account, from the spirit world.

Investigation told a different story, as it usually did. The record of exposed apports is substantial: Anna Rothe, a German medium whose Berlin séance was interrupted by police in 1902, was found to have concealed 157 flowers, oranges, and lemons in her petticoat; she served eighteen months. Charles Bailey, an Australian medium who produced live birds apparently from thin air, was undone when the dealer who had sold him the birds recognised them in the crowd. The psychologist Terence Hines documented the full range of concealment methods that the physical search of female mediums required investigators to confront. The summary from this record, as the Wikipedia article on apports states it, is categorical: no medium has demonstrated the production of an apport under conditions that excluded prior concealment.

What makes the record complicated is not the frauds but the investigators. Eusapia Palladino, the most exhaustively tested physical medium of the era, was caught, rehabilitated, caught again, and defended by serious researchers who insisted that some of her effects — produced under tight control — could not be explained by the methods of concealment her exposures had documented. The Naples sittings of 1908, studied by Feilding, Baggally, and Carrington for the Society for Psychical Research, remain the episode most often cited by proponents; the rebuttal turns on the difficulty of sustained control in semi-darkness with a cooperative investigator. The gap between the two readings of Palladino — thoroughgoing fraud or partially genuine — has not closed.

A related tradition ran through hagiography independently of Spiritualism. Bilocation — the appearance of a person in two locations simultaneously — was attributed to a long roster of Christian saints. Pythagoras, in the account Porphyry later transmitted, was reported to have appeared on the same day in Metapontum in Italy and Tauromenium in Sicily. Apollonius of Tyana was said to have been present simultaneously in Smyrna and Ephesus. Among the Christian saints, the tradition reached Anthony of Padua, Francis Xavier, Padre Pio, and Alphonsus Liguori, who claimed in 1774 to have attended the deathbed of Pope Clement XIV while his body remained in trance elsewhere. Catholic theology debated whether such accounts implied genuine physical duality or only a non-substantial apparition, a distinction that mattered for doctrine but did nothing to settle the question of what had actually occurred. The Iamblichus entry holds the theurgic framework — the Neoplatonist conviction that the soul’s relation to place could be altered by sacred rite — within which late-antique versions of such claims were organised.

Fort’s Word in the Paranormal Literature

Fort’s coinage did not immediately displace apport or bilocation; it arrived alongside them as a more general term for anomalous displacement of any kind. In the decades after Lo!, the word circulated in psychical-research writing and then in the UFO literature, where contactee accounts often described beings or objects that relocated instantaneously. The Fortean tradition proper — the network of researchers and periodicals that formed around Fort’s method after his death — expanded teleportation to cover poltergeist stone-throwings, cases of unexplained relocation of persons (several appear in Fort’s own notes), and the category he called “wild talents,” which his fourth book made explicit. By mid-century, teleportation was one of the vocabulary words of parapsychology, sitting beside telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis in the taxonomy Rhine had built at Duke. Unlike those, it never acquired a substantial experimental literature; the laboratory had no way to stage it.

What carried the word into mass culture was not parapsychology but science fiction. Star Trek’s transporter, introduced in the original television series in 1966, solved a production problem — landing shuttlecraft sequences were expensive — by dematerialising crew members and rematerialising them elsewhere. The transporter gave millions of viewers a vivid image: the figure shimmers, dissolves from the feet up, is gone, and reappears instantaneously on the surface below. That image — matter disassembled, transmitted as information, reassembled — was already near enough to what physicists would propose in 1993 that the name followed naturally. When Charles Bennett and his colleagues submitted their paper, teleportation was the obvious word, and they used it without defensiveness.

The Physics

In March 1993 Charles H. Bennett (IBM Research), Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Richard Jozsa, Asher Peres, and William K. Wootters published “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Channels” in Physical Review Letters. The paper described a protocol by which the complete quantum state of a particle — everything that quantum mechanics can know about it, encoded in its probability amplitudes — could be transferred to a distant particle with perfect fidelity, without the state ever traversing the intervening space.

The protocol requires three elements: an entangled pair of particles shared in advance between sender and receiver, the particle whose state is to be transferred, and an ordinary classical communication channel. The sender performs a joint measurement on her particle and one member of the entangled pair; the measurement yields two classical bits, which she transmits to the receiver by any conventional means. The receiver applies one of four corrective operations to his member of the entangled pair, depending on which two bits he receives, and the original state is restored exactly on his particle.

Two features define what the procedure actually is. First, the original state is necessarily destroyed in the sender’s measurement — by the no-cloning theorem, which forbids making a copy of an unknown quantum state, the original cannot survive the transfer. There is no duplication, only displacement. Second, the receiver cannot complete the reconstruction until the two classical bits arrive, and those bits travel at light speed or slower. The protocol is limited by the ordinary speed-of-light constraint. As the quantum.country exposition states it: “For Bob to recover the state |ψ⟩, Alice must send Bob two bits of classical information. The speed of that transmission is limited by the speed of light.” Quantum entanglement owns the correlations that make the protocol possible; the no-communication theorem, documented there, is what prevents those correlations from carrying a signal.

What is teleported is a description — the quantum state, the full complex of probabilities and phase relations that characterises the particle — not the particle’s physical substance. Asher Peres, one of the six authors, was once asked whether the procedure could be applied to a human being, and what that would mean for the soul. His answer was that the procedure would teleport “only the soul” — a physicist’s joke precise enough to be instructive.

Experimental Realisation and Scale

The paper was theoretical. The laboratory came four years later. In 1997 two independent groups demonstrated quantum teleportation experimentally. Boschi, Branca, De Martini, Hardy, and Popescu worked in Rome; Bouwmeester, Pan, Mattle, Eibl, Weinfurter, and Zeilinger worked in Innsbruck. Both used entangled photon pairs generated by parametric down-conversion, and both succeeded in transferring a polarisation state from one photon to another that had never interacted with it. Zeilinger’s group, in particular, had been building the experimental infrastructure for entanglement tests since the early 1990s, and his share of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger for the entangled-photon experiments, rested on the program of which the teleportation demonstrations were a celebrated part.

The scale of teleportation experiments expanded steadily. The distance record moved from laboratory-bench to 143 km of open air between observatories in the Canary Islands in 2012. Then, in 2017, the Chinese satellite Micius — launched August 2016 under lead scientist Pan Jianwei, with partners at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences — demonstrated teleportation of a photon state between a ground station in Tibet and the satellite. In 2021, full quantum-state teleportation was demonstrated over 1,200 km at ground level using entanglement distributed by the satellite. The programme extended to quantum key distribution and Bell-inequality tests at the same distance, establishing the template for a future global quantum network.

The role of teleportation in that network is not point-to-point matter transmission but quantum-state routing — the means by which a quantum processor at one node can effectively operate on a qubit that began its existence at another, without the qubit physically traversing the channel. The quantum entanglement and quantum measurement problem entries hold the foundational physics; teleportation, in the physicist’s sense, is applied entanglement.

The Gap Between the Two Words

The same word names two things that share almost nothing except the intuition that motivated Fort in 1931: that a thing might be here and, without any traceable journey, there. Fort’s teleportation was objects arriving unaccountably — flowers through locked doors, fish in sealed rooms, stones through clear skies. The physicists’ teleportation is a quantum state transferred by a protocol that requires a pre-shared entangled resource, a classical channel, and the total destruction of what was sent. The first tradition’s objects arrive intact; the physicist’s state arrives only because the original is gone.

The word migrated not because the phenomena converged but because science fiction had already attached the word to a compelling image, and the physicists writing in 1993 were working in a culture shaped by that image. Bennett and his colleagues knew what they were doing: they used teleportation in a paper in Physical Review Letters, the most formal venue available, and the name was understood immediately. The popularisation that followed the 1993 paper — which was substantial — often blurred the gap. The state that is transferred is not the particle’s matter; nothing material arrives at the destination that was not there before; and no version of the procedure, however scaled, would move a person. The human body is not a quantum state, and its atoms are not in a superposition that needs preserving.

The distinction matters because the word’s borrowed prestige has run in both directions. Paranormal writers after 1993 occasionally cited quantum teleportation as laboratory confirmation of what Fort had catalogued — a claim that misreads both the physics and the history, since the physics teleports only information, under conditions Fort’s anomalies never satisfied. In the other direction, the physics is sometimes presented, in popular writing, as more dramatic than it is — as if the quantum procedure were a step toward the Star Trek transporter, rather than a protocol for transferring a two-dimensional probability amplitude between photons. What the record shows is a word with two fully independent histories, joined by an accident of naming and kept apart by everything the physics actually requires.

Sources and Scholarship

Charles Fort’s Lo! (1931) is in the public domain; the passage coining teleportation appears in Chapter 2. The Gutenberg Project and other digital archives hold the text. The foundational physics paper is Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Richard Jozsa, Asher Peres, and William K. Wootters, “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Channels,” Physical Review Letters 70 (1993), 1895–1898; the abstract is openly accessible at the APS page for that volume. Anton Zeilinger’s popular account, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation (2010), covers both the physics and the experimental programme. The Micius satellite results appear in Pan Jianwei’s 2017–2021 papers in Nature and Physical Review Letters, cited with open-access summaries on the Chinese Academy of Sciences pages.

For the paranormal tradition: the Wikipedia article on apports surveys the documented séance record and its exposures; the Eusapia Palladino article on this site covers the most-investigated physical medium. For bilocation in hagiography, the Wikipedia article on bilocation collects the principal cases from Pythagoras through the Christian saints. The quantum physics is covered in the linked entries on quantum entanglement and the quantum measurement problem. The interactive exposition at quantum.country/teleportation explains the Bennett protocol step by step for a technically literate reader. The Wikipedia article on quantum teleportation surveys the experimental history from 1997 through the Micius programme.

→ Related: Spiritualism · Eusapia Palladino · Psychokinesis · Quantum Entanglement · Quantum Measurement Problem · Telepathy · Precognition · Remote Viewing · Iamblichus