John Griffith: A Tudor Martyr, a 106-Year-Old Test Pilot and a Destroyer

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This episode reads a single Wikipedia disambiguation page, the one for the name John Griffith, as a five-century history of who gets remembered. The earliest entries are a Welsh Cistercian monk active around 1553, just after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, the martyr John Jones, who died in 1598 and used John Griffith as an alias, and a General Baptist minister who lived from about 1622 to 1700. Alongside them sit Welsh landholders who sat in Parliament, including a John Griffith who represented Caernarvon in 1571, 1572 and 1604. Griffith is an anglicized form of the Welsh Gruffydd, and the Laws in Wales Acts sent Welsh representatives to Westminster.

From the late 1700s the name spreads into empire and industry: a John Griffith became governor of Bombay in 1795, John William Griffith (1789 to 1855) was an English architect and surveyor, and an Irish civil engineer born in 1848 worked into the 20th century. A Welsh-language journalist who lived from 1821 to 1877 marks the arrival of mass print. The 20th century brings aviators and sports figures, including John L. Griffith, the first commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, and later a chemist, a legal scholar, a rhythm and blues musician, a member of Cowboy Mouth, a Louisiana congressman and a U.S. Navy ship.

• John Jones, executed in 1598 when being a Catholic priest in Elizabethan England counted as treason, used John Griffith as an alias.
• John H. Griffith, a test pilot, was born in 1905 and lived until 2011, reaching 106.
• John Sharp Griffith, born in 1898, was an American flying ace of the First World War.
• Coaches named Griffith led programs at Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma A&M and the University of Georgia.
• The list ends with the USS John Griffith, where the name stops belonging to a person at all.