During the year 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was established. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg in the year 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born during the year 1831, formed the company. In 1858 Harland, who was the general manager at the time, bought the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
Harland at one time purchased Hickson's shipyard and made his assistant Wolff a partner in the company. Gustav Wolff was Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg's nephew. He has invested heavily in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships that were built by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Amongst his well-known ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Furthermore, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a flatter bottom and a square cross section.
The business eventually faced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding industry causing them to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to focus less on building ships and more on structural engineering and design. The company 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.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building a series of bridges in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. These bridges include the restoration of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. In the 1980s, their first venture into the civil engineering sector occurred 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 which was built to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in the year 2003, after being built under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.