During the year 1861, the business Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in the year 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in 1831, formed the business. During the year 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, purchased the small shipyard located on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
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 mainly in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which were built by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Amongst his well-known ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Moreover, 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 faced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding industry causing them to shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They chose to concentrate more on structural design and engineering and less on building ships. The company also diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for additional projects that had to do with metal engineering or construction.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff constructing a series of bridges in the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges include the restoration of both Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. In the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their first venture into the civil engineering sector happened.
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 constructed to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. During the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.