In which George goes a long way to find a Utah Teapot ...
... In Smithfield. Not Smithfield, Utah. Smithfield, Dublin, Ireland
“Remember. No matter where you go, there you are.”
— Buckaroo Banzai,
“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension”
DUBLIN — Riding the Luas tram through central Dublin, we noticed a square with a very large sculpture of a teapot. After a few times passing by, we stopped to have a look and to have a coffee at a nearby cafe.
We discovered that the title of the sculpture is “Smithfield Utah.”
[You never know when you are going to find a reminder of where you are from. It reminded me of when we were all in London five years ago, and sort of came all the way from Utah to see “The Book of Mormon” in the West End. Well, half the family did. The other half went to “Come From Away,” which I loved. I’m told that the London production of “The Book of Mormon” included a depiction of downtown Salt Lake City that was fairly accurate, though it included an image of a Tim Hortons — a coffee and donut place ubiquitous in Canada and Upstate New York but, sadly, not found in Utah.]
I hadn’t remembered that there is a Smithfield in Utah. There is, a town of some 9,500 folks in Cache County, not far from Logan.
But this teapot doesn’t relate particularly to that Smithfield. Though it does relate to Utah. And Smithfield, we came to find out, is also the name of the Dublin neighborhood where the sculpture stands.
George in front of the “Smithfield Utah” sculpture representing The Utah Teapot, Smithfield Square, Dublin. I appear in the photo just to show the scale.
Teapots, of course, are a symbol of Irish home and hearth, a cozy gathering place. But this particular neighborhood is apparently a bit of a mini Silicon Slopes, home to architects, video production shops, an arthouse movie theater and tech-centered businesses.
So when the city went looking to commission a sculpture for the area, as part of a plan to install several around the city, the winning design, by artist Alan Butler, was a representation of one of the first 3D computer graphics projects. Something called the Utah Teapot.
The sculpture was unveiled in 2021. The original Utah Teapot was created in 1975 by a University of Utah graduate student named Martin Newell, a mathematician by training who was one of the early pioneers of computer graphics.
He was looking for a common, recognizable shape — not too simple, not too complex — to use as a model for creating 3D images on 2D computer screens and printouts. The story is that he was talking to his wife about finding such a shape while the two of them were having tea. (He is Brit, after all.) She suggested the object on the table in front of them, a Melitta teapot.
The rest is history. The original teapot has a place of honor in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
The image has been copied and referenced many times since. An homage. An inside joke. It’s in an early Microsoft Windows screensaver and the first “Toy Story” movie, among many other places.
You just never know where familiar things are going to turn up.