And on the full-fledged QWERTY layout article, this claim is called "not formally substantiated". The actual citation in your link is from a collection of essay

And on the full-fledged QWERTY layout article, this claim is called "not formally substantiated". The actual citation in your link is from a collection of essays on science, paleontology, and evolutionary theory - exactly the kind of place that such an apocryphal claim could have been repeated for the sake of a pithy anecdote, rather than a reliable source on the history of typewriter layouts. Wikipedia editors' tendency to duplicate information in sub-section summaries is a great pain, due largely to this problem - who keeps the editorial voice, references, etc. consistent across all these non-linked articles?