In a letter from autumn 1696 to the Royal Swedish Bergs Collegium, the scientist and pre-industrial inventor, Christopher Polhem (1661-1751)—sometimes described as “the Father of Swedish Technology” (Lindroth 1951; Johnson 1963, Lindgren 2011)—argued that the Swedish king really ought to establish a <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Laboratorium mechanicum</hi>, all in order to foster future engineers. Importantly, this mechanical laboratory should have included educational <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">wood models</hi> of contemporary equipment, machines and building structures, as well as water gates, hoistings and locks. Following Polhem, mechanics was simply the foundation of all knowledge: ”mechaniken är en grund och fundament til heela philosophien”. A few years later, a mechanical laboratory was indeed founded by Polhem, established near the Falu copper mine. Essentially his <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Laboratorium mechanicum</hi> became a pioneering facility (albeit small) for the pre-industrial training of Swedish engineers, as well as a laboratory for testing and exhibiting Polhem’s own wooden models and designs. By the mid 1700, Polhem’s <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Laboratorium mechanicum</hi> had transformed into the so called, <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Royal Model Chamber</hi>, a Swedish institution (funded by the king) for information and dissemination of technology and architecture set up in central Stockholm. It was admired, for example, by Johann Beckmann on his trip through Sweden in the mid 1760s. Later, during the 19th century, the pedagogical models belonging to the Royal Model Chamber were frequently used by engineering students at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (in Stockholm). Apparently, this was especially the case with Polhem’s so called <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">mechanical alphabet</hi>. Initially, it consisted of 80 wooden models of basic machine elements like the lever, the wheel and the screw. Since a writer naturally had to know the alphabet in order to create words and sentences, Polhem argued that a contemporary <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">mechanicus</hi> had to grasp his mechanical alphabet to be able to construct and <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">understand</hi> machines. Evidently, Polhem’s models are interesting as physical traces of the <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">material foundations</hi> of scientific knowledge (Ludwig, Weber & Zausig, 2014). Around 1930, however, part of the Royal Model Chamber and Polhem’s mechanical alphabet collection was transferred to the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology. Ever since it has served—and been frequently exhibited—as a kind of <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">meta-museological artifact</hi>, since Polhem’s designs proved to be pedagogical museological objects <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">avant la lettre</hi>.