In the year 1861, the business Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg in 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born during the year 1831, established the business. During 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He bought the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
When Harland purchased Hickson's shipyard, he then made his assistant Wolff a partner in the company. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff was the nephew of Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg. 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 business a successful venture. Among 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 ship's capacity by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
The company eventually faced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding sector causing them to shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They decided to concentrate less on building ships and more on structural design and engineering. The business even diversified into the areas of offshore construction projects, ship repair and competing for additional projects which had to do with construction and metal engineering.
Harland and Wolff had other interests, such as a series of bridges to be built in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. These bridges consist of the restoration of both the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. During the 1980s, with the construction of the Foyle Bridge, their initial 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 utilized by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched during the year 2003, after being built under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.