1868, Christopher latham Shoals, an American compositor, obtained the model patent and operation right of the typewriter. A few years later, he designed a general keyboard layout scheme, namely "QWERTY" keyboard. The basic principle of this keyboard is to drive a long rod through the keys, and there is a hammer on the long rod. The hammer hits the paper through the ribbon, thus leaving a dark letter print, like stamping on the paper.

At the beginning, the keys of the keyboard were installed in alphabetical order, that is, the alphabetical order in the upper left corner of the keyboard was "ABCDEF". However, he soon found that when the typist typed a little faster, the long rod of two adjacent letters and the hammer might get stuck together, resulting in a "stuck key" failure. It is said that in order to solve this problem, Shoals went to his brother-in-law, a mathematician and a school teacher for help. Mathematicians advised him to separate the most commonly used linked letters on the keyboard to avoid the occurrence of faults. Shoals readily adopted his brother-in-law's solution, and arranged the letters out of order, finally forming the "QWERTY" layout we see now. Shoals told the public that the alphabetical order on the typewriter keyboard is the most scientific and can speed up typing.

However, authorities in the history of the development of English typewriters now consider this to be "one of the biggest cheating activities in history". Wilfred A Beecher, director of the British Typewriter Museum and author of Typewriter Century, claimed that "this so-called' scientific arrangement' to reduce the movement distance of fingers is a complete lie." "Any random arrangement of letters will be more reasonable than the present arrangement."

In 1980s, the typewriter market began to flourish, and many keyboards competed with QWERTY keyboards. However, just as the technical principle advantage of "QWERTY" layout is about to be replaced by the progress of typewriter engineering, the American typewriter industry quickly falls back to "QWERTY" layout, making it the "universal keyboard" of typewriters. In this process, the event that is considered to play a key role is a typing competition held in Cincinnati, USA on July 25th, 1888. In the competition, Frank McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City, used a "QWERTY" typewriter and a blind typing method to win the championship and a prize of 500 dollars with absolute advantage. MacGurry was obviously the first person to memorize this keyboard and type blindly. This incident established Remington's view that typewriters are more advanced in technology. Macquarie's choice of Remington typewriters may be random, but it has contributed to the establishment of this standard.

The contingency of history therefore determines the layout of the keyboard. The keyboard layout of typewriter inherits the computer keyboard and becomes the standard keyboard layout which is still widely used today.