LibriumArcana.Games

I earlier tonight watched the '11 Dr Who Christmas Special ('The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe') and the scene when the Platform crew beam out on Marge got me thinking. She's obviously flabberghasted, being from 1941, before Trek transporters became moderately well known, and I very much suspect modern day SciFi fans well versed with various forms of teleportation wouldn't be that much better of seeing it actually happen, but would pre-Trek SciFi fans (post-Trek the 'prepare for beamout' warning is something of a dead giveaway) be able to recognize it as a kind of teleportation technology? When was it first used in a Sci-Fi story?

Do you mean T.V., comics or print?

I mean anything SciFi that has obviously technological teleportation so someone familiar with the material, after they got over the 'OMG that didn't just happen' effect, would conclude to have been.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Disintegration Machine 1929. The first time on screen was I think Buck Rogers in the 1930s. The concept doesn't really kick off until the golden age of science fiction in the 1950s and doesn't hit popular culture until Star Trek in the 1960s.

So the answer would be older then you are.

Now if you want talk fantasy, teleportation has been around forever, showing up in middle eastern and Chinese stories.

No, I was absolutely talking about technological teleporters in SciFi, and the very reason I mentioned Trek was those were the the very first I was aware of. (The Perryverse had site-to-site teleportation with fixed installations before that, as had the ZBV series before it, but I can't recall any 'Scotty beam me up' teleportation earlier than that).

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the concept didn't show up earlier in science fiction than even that Doyle story. IIRC the internet was predicted in function in a story from around 1906, right down the the social alienation it could cause. But I really have no idea how you'd look something like that up, and there's probably been a lot of cool stuff predicted in the early early pulp mags that are now lost and gone forever.

E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series had fourth dimensional transportation/teleportation of everything from people to using the technology to transport stars and planets between galaxies, going back to the 1920's-1930's.