The business Harland and Wolff was established in 1861, by Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg in the year 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in the year 1831. During 1858 the general manager during the time, Harland, purchased the small shipyard located on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
Once Harland bought 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 mostly in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which the brand new shipyard built were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. Amongst his well-known ideas was increasing the ship's overall strength by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. What's more, 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 broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to concentrate more on structural design and engineering and less on building ships. The company even diversified into the areas of ship repair, offshore construction projects as well as competing for more projects that had to do with construction and metal engineering.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building a series of bridges in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. These bridges include the restoration of the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. During the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their first foray into the civil engineering sector occurred.
Today, the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was amongst six near identical Point class sealift ships that was constructed to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched during 2003, after being built under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.