During the year 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in 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 on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
When Harland bought 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 heavily in the Bibby Line. The initial 3 ships that the brand new shipyard built were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the business a successful venture. Among his well-known suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Moreover, he was able to increase the ship's capacity by giving the hulls a flatter bottom and a square cross section.
The company eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding industry causing them to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to concentrate less on building ships and more on structural design and engineering. The company also diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects as well as competing for more projects that had to do with metal engineering or construction.
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 comprise the restoration of both the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. In the 1980s, their first foray into the civil engineering sector happened with the construction of the Foyle Bridge.
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 for use by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in 2003, after being built under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.