The company Harland and Wolff was formed in the year 1861, by Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in the year 1831. In 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 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 initial 3 ships which the brand new shipyard built were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Among his well-known ideas was increasing the ship's overall strength by utilizing iron for the upper wodden decks. What's more, he was able to increase the ship's capacity 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 shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They chose to focus less on building ships and more on structural engineering and design. The business even diversified into the fields of offshore construction projects, ship repair and 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 the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges include the restoration of both the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. In the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their initial foray into the civil engineering sector happened.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding job of Harland and Wolff to date. This was amongst six near identical Point class sealift ships that was built to be used by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in the year 2003, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.