During 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg during the year 1834, and Mr. Edward James Harland born during the year 1831, established the company. In 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He bought the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
When Harland purchased Hickson's shipyard, he then made his assistant Wolff a partner in the company. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff was the nephew of Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg. He has invested heavily in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which the brand new shipyard made were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. Among his well-known suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Furthermore, he was able to increase the ship's capacity by giving the hulls a flatter bottom and a square cross section.
The business eventually experienced 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 company even diversified into the areas of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for additional projects which had to do with construction and metal engineering.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building a series of bridges in the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges comprise the restoration of both the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. During the 1980s, their first foray into the civil engineering sector took place with the construction of the Foyle Bridge.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff to date. This was one of six almost identical Point class sealift ships that was built for use by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in 2003, after being built under license from Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, German shipbuilders.