During the year 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was established. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg during the year 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born during 1831, formed the business. During the year 1858 Harland, who was the general manager during the time, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He bought 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 inventive, Harland made the business a successful venture. One of his well-known ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by using iron for the upper wodden decks. Also, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
The business 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 building ships. The company even diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects 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 include the restoration of both the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. During the 1980s, with the construction of the Foyle Bridge, their initial venture into the civil engineering sector happened.
To date, the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was amongst six near identical Point class sealift ships which was constructed for use by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in the year 2003, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.