Fridtjof Nansen had a theory. He believed that an Arctic current could carry a ship frozen in pack ice from Siberia across the North Pole to Greenland. To test it, he needed a vessel that would not be crushed when the ice closed in. He commissioned Scots-Norwegian shipbuilder Colin Archer to design a ship with a rounded hull that would rise under pressure rather than splinter. The result was the Fram, launched in 1892 and financed through a combination of Norwegian government grants and private funding. Nansen's expedition of 1893 to 1896 proved his current theory roughly correct: the Fram drifted with the ice, surviving pressures that would have destroyed a conventional ship. The hull's egg-shaped cross-section forced the vessel upward as ice squeezed inward, riding on top of the frozen sea rather than being consumed by it.

After Nansen, the Fram served Otto Sverdrup from 1898 to 1902, exploring and mapping the Canadian Arctic archipelago. Sverdrup charted more than 250,000 square kilometers of previously uncharted territory, adding entire island groups to the map. Then came Roald Amundsen. In 1910, Amundsen sailed the Fram south toward Antarctica on what the world believed was a scientific expedition. Only at sea did he reveal his true objective: to beat Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole. Amundsen reached it on December 14, 1911. The Fram had carried explorers to the farthest reaches of both hemispheres, her wooden hull enduring conditions that tested the limits of maritime engineering.

In 2009, the Fram Museum acquired the Gjoa, the first vessel to navigate the Northwest Passage. Amundsen and a crew of six had accomplished that feat between 1903 and 1906, threading through the Arctic waterways connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific that had defeated expeditions for centuries. The Gjoa, far smaller than the Fram, now sits in her own dedicated building at the museum, fully accessible to visitors since 2017. Together, the two ships represent the golden age of Norwegian polar exploration: the passage that mapmakers had dreamed of since the 16th century and the polar journeys that pushed humanity to the planet's extremes.

The Fram Museum sits on Bygdoy, a peninsula dense with institutions devoted to Norwegian exploration and culture. The Kon-Tiki Museum, housing Thor Heyerdahl's balsa raft, stands nearby. The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, the Viking Ship Museum, and the Norwegian Maritime Museum are all within walking distance. Bygdoy Royal Estate, the official summer residence of the King of Norway, and the historic Oscarshall palace complete the cluster. The concentration of exploration artifacts in this single neighborhood speaks to how central polar achievement remains to Norwegian identity. In a nation that produces North Sea oil and manages a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, the ships on Bygdoy recall an earlier era when Norway's greatest resource was the willingness of its people to sail toward places no one had reached.