The company Harland and Wolff was established during 1861, by Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg in 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born in 1831. In the year 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard situated on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
Harland at one time purchased Hickson's shipyard and made his assistant Wolff a partner in the company. Gustav Wolff was Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg's nephew. He has invested heavily in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which the brand new shipyard made were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. Among his well-known ideas was increasing the ship's overall strength by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Additionally, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a flatter bottom and a square cross section.
The company eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding sector causing them to shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They chose to focus more on structural engineering and design and less on shipbuilding. The company even diversified into the fields of offshore construction projects, ship repair and 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 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. In the 1980s, with the construction of the Foyle Bridge, their initial venture into the civil engineering sector occurred.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding job of Harland and Wolff to date. This was among six near identical Point class sealift ships which was built to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. During 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.