Smith said that if audio is for sonics radio is for electronics video is for television signals then transmitting matter is "mateo." That word never caught on either. The popular term for matter transmitter back in the day was "transmat". Which is a pity because it allows science fiction authors to explore all sorts of deep philosophical questions. This may or may not be the reason why the concept has become passé in science fiction. So nowadays everybody knows what a transporter is, and the phrase " beam me up Scotty, there are no intelligent life forms here" is part of the popular lexicon. One cheap optical effect to "beam" the crew down and they were well into the story by script page two. But in 1965 Gene Roddenberry was developing a new TV series called "Star Trek" and found that landing the crew on an alien planet in some kind of shuttle would blow their entire special effect budget. This used to be a mind-boggling cutting-edge science fiction concept back in the late 1800's, e.g., "Professor Vehr's Electrical Experiment" (24 January 1885 The Argonaut) by Robert Duncan Milne. Larry Niven defined "teleportation" as any method of moving from point to point in negligible time.
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