tripod

tripod, any piece of furniture with three legs. The word can apply to a wide range of objects, including stools, tables, light stands, and pedestals. The tripod was very popular in ancient and classical times, largely because it was associated with religious or symbolic rites in the form of an altar, a sacrificial basin, or the most celebrated tripod of all, the seat at Delphi upon which the Pythian priestess sat to deliver the oracles of the god Apollo. Underlying the tripod’s association with such rites was perhaps a mystical significance attached to the number three. The idea of three being united in one could very well have influenced the widespread use of the tripod in Christian liturgical furniture such as candlesticks.

The most obvious functional advantage of the tripod is its property of remaining steady on an uneven surface, as seen at its most basic level in the stool. In the 17th century it became apparent that, for seating purposes, the most useful type of table was a circular one supported on a single column, and for this a tripod base was essential. The tripod remained the most common support of circular tables throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and it is only recently that it has been supplanted either by a metal cross lying flat on the floor and supporting a slender column or by a molded plastic column with a circular base. The use of the tripod for more decorative forms of furniture (freestanding candelabra, for example) was stimulated in the late 18th century by the growth of interest in classical and ancient furniture and in the 19th by the production of cast-iron furniture, such as garden tables and similar mass-produced units.