During 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg during the year 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in 1831, established the company. During the year 1858 Harland, who was the general manager at the time, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
Harland at one time bought 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 venture. Among his famous ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Also, he was able to increase the ship's capacity 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 shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They chose to concentrate less on building ships and more on structural design and engineering. The company even diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for additional projects which had to do with metal engineering or construction.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building a series of bridges in the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges comprise the restoration of the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. During the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their first foray into the civil engineering sector occurred.
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 used by the Ministry of Defense. In 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, German shipbuilders.