Samuel Dyer

Samuel Dyer (台約爾, 20 February 1804 – 24 October 1843) was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China in the Congregationalist tradition who worked among the Chinese in Malaysia. He arrived in Penang in 1827. Dyer, his wife Maria, and their family lived in Malacca and then in Singapore. He was known as a typographer for creating a steel typeface of Chinese characters for printing to replace traditional wood blocks. Dyer's type was accurate, aesthetically pleasing, durable, and practical. Life in England Samuel Dyer was born at the Royal Greenwich Hospital, England, to John Dyer and Eliza (Seager). He was the fifth of the eight Dyer children. His father was a secretary of the Royal Hospital for Seaman and later became Chief clerk of the Admiralty in 1820. John was also an acquaintance of Robert Morrison, who was soon to become the first Protestant missionary to China. Morrison and his Chinese tutor Yong Sam-tek visited the Dyer home in Greenwich during Morrison's period of study in medicine and astronomy between 1805 and 1806. Dyer was schooled at home until he was 12 and then educated in a boarding school at Woolwich, in south-east London from 1816, superintended by the Rev. John Bickerdike, a minister with the English Dissenters. In 1820 he experienced a conversion to Christ at Thomas Wilson's Paddington Chapel, in Paddington, Northwest London, under ministry of the Rev. James Stratten, and soon Dyer began teaching Sunday school there. In 1822 he was formally admitted into membership.