The four men who had taken hold of Bell’s invention in its infancy and brought it to maturity were ready to surrender its care into the hands of the able business men who headed the Bell Company. Sanders sold his stock in the company for a little less than a million dollars, Watson, when he resigned his interest, found himself sufficiently rich to build a ship-building plant near Boston and employ four thousand workmen to build battle-ships. Gardiner G. Hubbard retired from active business life, and transferred his remarkable energy to the affairs of the National Geographical Society. Bell had presented his stock in the company to his wife on their wedding-day, and he now took up afresh the work of his boyhood and youth, the teaching of deaf-mutes. But he was no longer unheeded nor unrewarded. In 1880 the government of France awarded him the Volta prize of fifty thousand francs and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. With the Volta prize he founded the Volta Laboratory in Washington for the use of students. In Washington he has made his home, and there scientists of all lands call to pay their respects to the patriarch of American inventors. Shortly after the first appearance of the telephone at the Centennial Exposition men were accustomed to laugh at the new invention, and call it a freak, a scientific toy. Its mechanism was so incomprehensible to most people that they refused to regard it seriously. A Boston mechanic expressed the general ignorance when he stoutly maintained that in his opinion there must be “a hole through the middle of the wire.” And the telephone is still to most people a mystery, far more so than the telegraph or the incandescent light or the other uses to which electricity has been put. It is one thing to send a message by the mechanical process of dots and dashes made by breaking and joining a current. It is quite another to reproduce in one place the exact inflection, tone, and quality of a voice that is speaking hundreds of miles away, across rivers and mountains. There is real magic in that, the wonder that might be found in a Genii’s spell in the Arabian Nights. How can people be blamed for laughing at such pretensions, and believing that even if such a thing were true it was more fit for an exposition than for public use? Yet this thing of magic has outdistanced every other mode of communication. It is estimated that in the United States as many messages are sent by telephone as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad passengers. The telephone wires are eight times greater than the telegraph wires, and their earnings six times as great. It is true that the telephone is vastly more used in America than in other parts of the world, and yet it is figured that in the world at large almost as many messages are now telephoned as are sent by post.