In present-day his family members still live in, Although some are spread out in Yorkshire and Grimsby, England, and he studied at the Andersonian Institution.
[1] Griffin commenced business in Glasgow as a bookseller, publisher, and dealer in chemical apparatus, in partnership with his eldest brother.
[1] By the 1860s this company had established a shop on Bunhill Row and later Long Acre in London, selling both self-made and imported equipment.
[3] Griffin devised many new forms of chemical apparatus, including the common style of beaker which sometimes bears his name,[2] and did much in introducing scientific methods into commercial processes.
Of these the first was On a New Method of Crystallographic Notation; Report British Association, 1840, p. 88; and the last A Description of a Patent Blast Gas Furnace, Chemical News, 1860, pp.