retort stand

He went to a bench, on which stood a haphazard arrangement of retort stands, lamps, gratings and lenses.

There was a pile of ruined equipment behind them, steam pipes and conducting wires, the clasps from retort stands, lenses like marbles.

A retort stand, sometimes called a ring stand, is a piece of scientific equipment, to which clamps can be attached to hold test tubes and other equipment such as burettes which are most often used in titration experiments.

There was a small electric lamp with a curved mirror behind it, and, perhaps a yard away, a white screen, held upright by a retort stand; between these two, clamped in the claws of another retort, was a cardboard panel which bore the evidence of fine scoring.

"So one afternoon, friends and I gripped an old camera in a retort stand and connected it to a spare computer, then wrote a program [known as XCoffee] that allowed anyone in our group to display a live image of the pot in the corner of their screen.