Revealed: The story behind the world's most famous movie teapot

As humble items go, the teapot is among the humblest of all.

But not the Utah Teapot.

Thanks to some fascinating insight from tech YouTuber Tom Scott (via Mashable), who recently visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, this particular teapot is already part of movie history.

“It’s an in-joke amongst animators,” he explains, in the latest part of his Things You Might Not Know web series.

“And that’s because it was the first realistic, complex object to be widely used in computer graphics.”

Indeed, the teapot, also known as the Newell Teapot, was rendered by British computer graphics pioneer Martin Newell, because the shape of a teapot is pretty much unmistakable, meaning that it could be used as a reference when creating computer generated shapes.

First drawing the teapot on graph paper, he then plotted the co-ordinates directly into his computer to create the digital drawing.

And since then, (1974, to be exact) it’s appeared in movies and animated TV shows from ‘Toy Story’ (the classic Mrs Nesbitt scene) to ‘The Simpsons’.

‘Literally billions of people have seen… a digital version of this teapot, that can be described in one page of numbers,” he goes on.

So yes, in the absence of a better-known vessel, the Utah teapot is the best known teapot in the world.

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