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Language: en

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I'm at the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View, California,

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and amongst all the thousands of artifacts
here is this:

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a regular, everyday teapot.

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The world's most famous teapot.

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It's called the Utah Teapot, and you've almost
certainly seen it before,

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even if you don't realise it.

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Or at least, a digital version of it.

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In the old Windows Pipes screensaver,

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occasionally instead of a ball joint,

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a teapot would appear.

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This teapot.

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It's in the background of that 3D-animated
Simpsons episode from the 90s,

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and it's in a couple of Pixar films.

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It's an in-joke amongst animators,

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and that's because it was the first realistic,
complex object

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to be widely used in computer graphics.

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In 1974, a researcher at the University of
Utah called Martin Newell

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needed a reference object, something simple
to test the algorithms he was designing.

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The story goes that he told his wife this
as they were sitting down for tea --

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Newell was born in Britain, so tea --

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and she suggested that modelling the teapot.

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And it was ideal.

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It has concave and convex surfaces.

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It can cast shadows on itself,

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which is a problem that some algorithms might
find difficult to solve.

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It's immediately recognisable:

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you can tell by eye if the teapot looks like
a teapot,

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or if something's gone wrong with your rendering.

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And you don't have to texture it to make it
look good.

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As long as it has a plain, light colour, and
it...

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well, it... it looks like a teapot.

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But it's also not too complicated: back in
the seventies,

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computer graphics involved a lot of working
by hand.

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Newell sketched the teapot on graph paper,

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and then typed in the resulting coordinates
by hand.

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And here's what I really like about the teapot:

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over the forty-something years that the digital
version of it has existed,

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details about it have been lost to history.

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It's said that it was used so much for early
graphics experiments

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that some people could remember all of its
data in their head

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and just type it in when they needed it.

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Can I find a reliable source for that?

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Absolutely not,

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but it's a great story.

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And at some point, the teapot got squished
a bit:

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some people claim that it's because of old
displays with non-square pixels,

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and some claim it's just because it looked
better that way.

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This is a artifact of the digital era that's
got urban legends around it.

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And whether they're true or not,

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there's now a canonical version of the teapot:

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a digital object that's been copied and copied
and copied into all sorts of modern culture.

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Literally billions of people have seen -- well,
not this teapot --

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but a version of it that can be described
in one page of numbers.

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Thanks very much to the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, California!

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Pull down the description for links to them
and the amazing exhibits they've got here.