Samuel Morse tapped out this historic message upon inventing the telegraph: What hath God wrought?
22 characters long.
Alexander Graham Bell's first spoken words on a telephone: Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.
41 characters.
Neil Armstrong upon walking onto the moon: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
58 characters.
Some of man's greatest breakthroughs have been announced in a
handful of words, so perhaps the new form of "micro-blogging" called
twitter, which limits all messages to 140 characters, is onto something.
Launched a few years ago, twitter got a lot of attention during
the recent political conventions with delegates, journalists and
bloggers twittering away on their cell phones and laptops from the
floor.
The premise of twitter is that you're supposed to write about what
you're doing "at that moment," which produced such posts as "Just saw Sean Penn smoking outside the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. He said he's in town for the convention."