The company Harland and Wolff was formed in 1861, by Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg in the year 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in the year 1831. In 1858 Harland, who was the general manager during the time, purchased the small shipyard situated on Queen's Island. He bought the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
When 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 heavily in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which the brand new shipyard made were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Among his well-known suggestions was increasing the overall strength of the ship by using iron for the upper wodden decks. Moreover, 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 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 company also diversified into the fields of offshore construction projects, ship repair as well as competing for additional projects that had to do with metal engineering or construction.
Harland and Wolff had other interests, like a series of bridges to be built 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. In the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their first foray into the civil engineering sector took place.
Today, the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was among six near identical Point class sealift ships that was built to be used by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in 2003, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.