Oscar II ruled during a time when both countries were undergoing a period of industrialization and rapid technological progress.

In 1905, the throne of Norway was transferred to his grandnephew Prince Carl of Denmark under the regnal name Haakon VII.

[3] Prince Oscar entered the Royal Swedish Navy as a midshipman at the age of 11, and was appointed junior lieutenant in July 1845.

[2] While the King, his family and the Royal Court resided mostly in Sweden, Oscar II made the effort of learning to be fluent in Norwegian and from the very beginning realized the essential difficulties in the maintenance of the union between the two countries.

When the coastal defence ship Oscar II was launched, he even signed his name on the vessel's aft main gun tower.

The most known and powerful first minister of the Crown during the reign of Oscar was the conservative estate owner Erik Gustaf Boström.

Over a period of time, the King gave Boström a free hand to select his own ministers without much royal involvement.

[6][7] The contest listed four potential areas of research, one of which was the n-body problem in celestial mechanics, relevant to the stability of the solar system.

Henri Poincare, a professor at the University of Paris, won by submitting an entry showing that even the 3-body problem was unstable, the seminal result in what is now called chaos theory.

Along with Swedish millionaire Oscar Dickson and Russian magnate Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Sibiryakov, he was the patron of a number of pioneering Arctic expeditions in the 1800s.

Among the ventures the king sponsored, the most important are Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld's explorations to the Russian Arctic and Greenland, and Fridtjof Nansen's Polar journey on the Fram.

The political events which led up to the peaceful dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden in 1905 could hardly have been attained but for the tact and patience of the king himself.

His second son, Prince Oscar, lost his rights of succession to the throne upon his unequal marriage in 1888 to a former lady-in-waiting, Ebba Munck af Fulkila, and was granted the title of Prince Bernadotte first in Sweden, and from 1892 in Luxembourg, where he also was created Count of Wisborg as an hereditary title for his marital progeny (Adolphe, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, was the half-brother of his mother, Queen Sophia).