The business Harland and Wolff was established during the year 1861, by Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in the year 1834, and Mr. Edward James Harland born during 1831. In the year 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard located 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 mostly in the Bibby Line. The initial 3 ships that the brand new shipyard constructed were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the company a successful venture. Amongst his well-known suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. 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 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 less on shipbuilding and more on structural design and engineering. The company even diversified into the areas of offshore construction projects, ship repair as well as competing for more 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 consist of the restoration of both Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. During the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their first foray into the civil engineering sector occurred.
To date, the last shipbuilding job of Harland and Wolff was the MV Anvil Point. This was among six almost identical Point class sealift ships that was constructed to be used by the Ministry of Defense. During the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, shipbuilders from Germany.