Early printed distillation manuals, including Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de arte distillandi of 1500, describe delivery pipes, called worms for their crooked or coiled shape, carrying vapor from a still to a receiver set on a stool or small table below. Coiling the pipe and submerging it in cold water was the refinement that turned a simple delivery tube into a true high-efficiency condenser, and the practice was well established in European distilling workshops by the sixteenth century, spreading through the same printed manual tradition that popularized named still heads like the moor's head and the rosenhut. The worm proved so effective that it outlasted almost every other piece of alchemical still equipment: it is the direct ancestor of what a modern chemistry laboratory calls a serpentine condenser or, in one common design, a Graham condenser, and the coil-in-cold-water principle is unchanged in either.
Outside the laboratory, the same apparatus, still called a worm by name, remains the standard condenser in traditional pot-still distilleries making whisky and other spirits, and it gives its name informally to illegal moonshine stills, where "worm" and "still" are used almost interchangeably. Few pieces of alchemical laboratory equipment moved this directly, and under this little a change of name, into both a modern industry and a modern laboratory bench.