In the year 1861, the business Harland and Wolff was established. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg during the year 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born in 1831, established the business. During the year 1858 the general manager during the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He bought 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 first 3 ships which were made by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the company a successful undertaking. Among his well-known suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by using iron for the upper wodden decks. What's more, he was able to increase the ship's capacity by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
Harland and Wolff eventually experienced competitive pressures in regards to building ships. They sought to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to concentrate less on shipbuilding and more on structural design and engineering. The company also diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for more projects that had to do with construction and metal engineering.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff constructing a series of bridges in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. These bridges comprise the restoration of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. In the 1980s, with the construction of the Foyle Bridge, their initial foray into the civil engineering sector occurred.
To date, the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was among six almost identical Point class sealift ships which was built to be used by the Ministry of Defense. In the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.