During 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg in 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born during 1831, formed the business. During the year 1858 the general manager during the time, Harland, purchased the small shipyard 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 that the brand new shipyard constructed were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the company a successful venture. Amongst his famous suggestions was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Furthermore, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a flatter bottom and a square cross section.
The business eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding sector causing them to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to concentrate less on shipbuilding and more on structural design and engineering. The company also diversified into the fields of offshore construction projects, ship repair as well as competing for more projects that had to do with metal engineering or construction.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building a series of bridges in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. These bridges consist of the restoration of both Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. During the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their initial venture into the civil engineering sector occurred.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff to date. This was amongst six near identical Point class sealift ships which was constructed to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. During 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, German shipbuilders.