By LEONARD C. BRUNO With the February release of its online
version of a portion of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers,
the Library of Congress continued a tradition of electronic
communication that began more than a century ago with the first
successful telephone message: "Mr. Watson — come here — I want
to see you." These and other historic first transmissions and
the communication revolutions they engendered are documented in
the manuscript holdings of the Library of Congress. All
Americans recognize the simple but profoundly significant first
messages sent by Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) in 1876 and a
generation earlier by telegraph inventor Samuel F.B. Morse
(1791-1872) — "What hath God wrought?" Now, anyone with Internet
access can examine a selection of the Bell papers on the
Library's American Memory Web site at www.loc.gov. With a
generous grant from the AT&T Foundation (see LC Information
Bulletin, March 1999), the Library has begun a project to
digitize significant portions of its Bell an