In 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in 1831, formed the business. During 1858 Harland, who was the general manager during the time, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
When Harland bought 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 business a successful undertaking. Amongst his famous suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. As well, he was able to increase the ship's capacity by giving the hulls a flatter bottom and a square cross section.
The company eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding industry causing them to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to concentrate less on building ships and more on structural design and engineering. The business also diversified into the fields of offshore construction projects, ship repair and competing for more projects that had to do with construction and metal engineering.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff constructing a series of bridges 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, their first foray into the civil engineering sector took place with the building of the Foyle Bridge.
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 which was built to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched during the year 2003, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.