When mechanical typewriters were developed, touch-typists had to be slowed down by inefficient keyboard layouts because their increasing dexterity would continually jam the mechanically slow machines. One of the most inefficient designs (by Christopher Scholes in 1873) was the QWERTY layout, which was adopted and mass-produced by Remington. More typists accordingly learned on the QWERTY layout, more companies therefore adopted the same layout, and a virtually unbreakable lock-in of the QWERTY keyboard resulted.-- Mark Mason: "Making Educational Development and Change Sustainable", International Journal of Educational Development, Vol.29, No.2 (March 2009), pp.117-124.

"Touch-typists had to be slowed down" is nothing but a hoax by Mr. Robert Parkinson, as I mentioned before. The QWERTY keyboard was invented by Mr. Christopher Latham Sholes, not Scholes (cf. U. S. Patent No.207559). E. Remington & Sons adopted QWERTY keyboard, but the other typewriter companies, including Caligraph and Hammond, offered their own keyboard arrangements, not QWERTY, in the 1880's.