In 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born in 1831, established the business. In 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He bought the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
Harland at one time bought Hickson's shipyard and made his assistant Wolff a partner in the business. Gustav Wolff was Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg's nephew. He has invested mostly in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which were made by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the business a successful venture. Among his famous suggestions was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Moreover, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a flatter bottom and a square cross section.
Harland and Wolff were eventually faced with competitive pressures in regards to building ships. They sought to shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They chose to concentrate more on structural engineering and design and less on building ships. The business even diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for additional projects that had to do with construction and metal engineering.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building a series of bridges 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. During the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their initial venture into the civil engineering sector occurred.
To date, the last shipbuilding job of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was amongst six almost identical Point class sealift ships that was built to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. In 2003, the ship was launched, after being built under license from Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, shipbuilders from Germany.