During the year 1861, the business Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in 1834, and Mr. Edward James Harland born in the year 1831, established the company. In 1858 Harland, who was the general manager at the time, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
Once Harland purchased Hickson's shipyard, he then made his assistant Wolff a partner in the business. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff was the nephew of Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg. He has invested mainly in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships that the brand new shipyard built were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Among his well-known ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Also, he was able to increase the ship's capacity by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
The company eventually faced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding sector causing them to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They chose to concentrate less on shipbuilding and more on structural design and engineering. The business even diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for more projects that had to do with metal engineering or construction.
Harland and Wolff had other interests, such as a series of bridges to be built in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. These bridges comprise the restoration of both Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. During the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their initial foray into the civil engineering sector took place.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding job of Harland and Wolff to date. This was one of six near identical Point class sealift ships that was built for use by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in the year 2003, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.