Griffin (The Invisible Man) Griffin (The Invisible Man) Dr. Griffin is the main protagonist, also known as The Invisible Man, who appears as the title character in H. G. Wells' 1897 science fiction novella "The Invisible Man". In the original novel, Griffin is a scientist whose research in optics and experiments into changing the human body's refractive index to that of air results in his becoming invisible. The character has become iconic, particularly in horror fiction, and versions and variations have appeared throughout various media. Griffin is a brilliant research scientist who discovers a formula for making a human being invisible. The formula entails
The Invisible Man Griffin's notes; but since they are written in code, he is completely incapable of understanding them. Children's literature was a prominent genre in the 1890s. According to John Sutherland, Wells and his contemporaries such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling "essentially wrote boy's books for grown-ups." Sutherland identifies "The Invisible Man" as one such book. Wells said that his inspiration for the novella was "The Perils of Invisibility," one of the "Bab Ballads" by W. S. Gilbert, which includes the couplet "Old Peter vanished like a shot/but then - his suit of clothes did not." Another