In the year 1861, the business Harland and Wolff was established. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born during the year 1831, formed the company. In the year 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
Once Harland bought 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 mainly in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which were made by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. One of his famous suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by utilizing iron for the upper wodden decks. Moreover, 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 shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They chose to focus more on structural engineering and design and less on building ships. The company even diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for additional 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 consist of the restoration of both Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. In the 1980s, with the construction of the Foyle Bridge, their initial venture into the civil engineering sector took place.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding job of Harland and Wolff to date. This was amongst six near identical Point class sealift ships that was constructed for use by the Ministry of Defense. In the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.