During the year 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in the year 1834, and Mr. Edward James Harland born in 1831, established the business. In the year 1858 the general manager during the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard situated on Queen's Island. He bought the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
Once Harland purchased 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 mostly in the Bibby Line. The initial 3 ships which the brand new shipyard constructed were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. One of his well-known suggestions was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. 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.
Harland and Wolff eventually experienced competitive pressures in regards to building ships. They sought to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to concentrate less on shipbuilding and more on structural engineering and design. The business also diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects as well as competing for more 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, their initial venture into the civil engineering sector took place with the construction of the Foyle Bridge.
Today, the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was one of six near identical Point class sealift ships which was built for use by the Ministry of Defense. During the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being built under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.