In quantum teleportation, a photon was the type of particle first teleported experimentally in 1997.
The experiment was reported by Anton Zeilinger, Dik Bouwmeester, Jian-Wei Pan, Klaus Mattle and collaborators. It transferred the polarization state of one photon to another photon, rather than transporting the original photon itself. The method used a pair of entangled photons, a joint measurement, and classical communication of the measurement result.
The 1997 demonstration followed a 1993 theoretical proposal by Charles Bennett and colleagues. In the experiment, the original photon's polarization information was destroyed by measurement, while the distant photon acquired the corresponding state after a corrective operation.
Quantum teleportation is often confused with faster-than-light travel or copying. It does neither: classical information must still be sent, so the process cannot transmit usable information instantaneously. It also obeys the no-cloning theorem because the original quantum state is not preserved. Later experiments teleported states across optical fibers, through open air and between different physical systems.