The business Harland and Wolff was established during 1861, by Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg during 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in the year 1831. During the year 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard situated on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
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 made were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. One of his well-known ideas 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 flatter bottom and a square cross section.
The business eventually faced 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 design and engineering. The business even diversified into the fields 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 the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges consist of the restoration of both the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. In the 1980s, their first venture into the civil engineering sector took place with the construction of the Foyle Bridge.
Today, the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was one of six almost identical Point class sealift ships which was constructed to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. In the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being built under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.