During 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg in 1834, and Mr. Edward James Harland born during 1831, established the business. During 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.
Harland at one time bought Hickson's shipyard and made his assistant Wolff a partner in the business. Gustav Wolff was Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg's nephew. He has invested heavily in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which the brand new shipyard built were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Among his well-known suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by utilizing iron for the upper wodden decks. Additionally, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
The business eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding sector causing them to shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They decided to concentrate more on structural design and engineering and less on building ships. The company also diversified into the areas of offshore construction projects, ship repair and competing for additional projects which had to do with metal engineering or construction.
Harland and Wolff had other interests, like a series of bridges to be built in the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges include the restoration of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. In the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their first foray into the civil engineering sector occurred.
Today, the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was among six almost identical Point class sealift ships that was constructed for use by the Ministry of Defense. In 2003, the ship was launched, after being built under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.