During 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was established. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in the year 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born during the year 1831, formed the business. During the year 1858 Harland, who was the general manager at the time, purchased the small shipyard located on Queen's Island. He bought 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 mainly in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships that were made by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Among his famous ideas was increasing the ship's overall strength by utilizing iron for the upper wodden decks. What's more, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
The company eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding industry causing them to shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They decided to focus more on structural design and engineering and less on shipbuilding. The company even diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for more projects that had to do with construction and metal engineering.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building 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 initial 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 among six almost identical Point class sealift ships which was built to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. During 2003, the ship was launched, after being built under license from Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, shipbuilders from Germany.