What is "teleparallelism"

n. (context physics English) An early attempt at unifying electromagnetism and gravity

Teleparallelism (also called teleparallel gravity), was an attempt by Einstein to base a unified theory of electromagnetism and gravity on the mathematical structure of distant parallelism, also referred to as absolute or teleparallelism. In this theory, a spacetime is characterized by a curvature-free linear connection in conjunction with a metric tensor field, both defined in terms of a dynamical tetrad field.