It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot designed by Lieselotte Kantner [de] that appears solid with a nearly rotationally symmetrical body.

[4] Following that, he went back to the computer laboratory and edited bézier control points on a Tektronix storage tube, again by hand.

[citation needed] The teapot shape contained a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time: it was round, contained saddle points, had a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, could project a shadow on itself, and could be displayed accurately without a surface texture.

Jim Blinn stated that he scaled the model on the vertical axis during a demo in the lab to demonstrate that they could manipulate it.

Along with the expected cubes and spheres, the GLUT library even provides the function glutSolidTeapot() as a graphics primitive, as does its Direct3D counterpart D3DX (D3DXCreateTeapot()).

BeOS and Haiku include a small demo of a rotating 3D teapot, intended to show off the platform's multimedia facilities.

[8][9] The original, physical Melitta teapot was purchased from ZCMI (a department store in Salt Lake City) in 1974.

[15] One famous ray-traced image, by James Arvo and David Kirk in 1987,[16] shows six stone columns, five of which are surmounted by the Platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron).

[17] The image is titled "The Six Platonic Solids", with Arvo and Kirk calling the teapot "the newly discovered Teapotahedron".

An origami version of the teapot, folded by Tomohiro Tachi, was shown at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art in Israel in a 2007–2008 exhibit.

[27] In 2015, the California-based company Emerging Objects followed suit, but this time printed the teapot, along with teacups and teaspoons, out of actual tea.