"John Fryer (1839–1928) came to China in 1861 under the Church of England and from 1868 spent twenty-eight years translating at the Jiangnan Arsenal, orally translating more than a hundred scientific works and founding the science journal Gezhi Huibian (The Chinese Scientific Magazine). In 1896 he became professor of Oriental languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, yet China remained on his heart: in 1911 he gave 60,000 taels of silver to found the Shanghai school for blind children, and had his younger son George B. Fryer train in the education of the blind and go to China as its principal. In 1915 he told Huang Yanpei: "For decades my living came entirely from the Chinese people; I must find a way to repay them.""
— Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity (BDCC)