bbard withdrew from business life, and as it was
impossible for a man of his ardent temperament to be idle, he plunged
into the National Geographical Society. He was a Colonel Sellers whose
dream of millions (for the telephone) had come true; and when he died,
in 1897, he was rich both in money and in the affection of his friends.
Charles Williams, in whose workshop the first telephones were made, sold
his factory to the Bell Company in 1881 for more money than he had ever
expected to possess. Thomas A. Watson resigned at the same time, finding
himself no longer a wage-worker but a millionaire. Several years later
he established a shipbuilding plant near Boston, which grew until it
employed four thousand workmen and had built half a dozen warships for
the United States Navy.

As for Bell, the first cause of the telephone business, he did what a
true scientific Bohemian might have been expected to do; he gave all
his stock to his bride on their marriage-day and resumed his work as an
instructor of deaf-mutes. Few kings, if any, had ever given so rich a
wedding present; and certainly no one in any country ever obtained and
tossed aside an immense fortune as incidentally as did Bell. When the
Bell Company offered him a salary of ten thousand dollars a year to
remain its chief inventor, he refused the offer cheerfully on the ground
that he could not "invent to order." In 1880, the French Government gave
him the Volta Prize of fifty thousand francs and the Cross of the Legion
of Honor. He has had many honors since then, and many interests. He
has been for thirty years one of the most brilliant and picturesque
personalities in American public life. But none of his later
achievements can in any degree compare with what he did in a cellar in
Salem, at twenty-eight years of age.

They had all become rich, these first friends of the telephone, but not
fabulously so. There was not at that time, nor has there been since, any
one who became a multimillionaire by the sale of telephone service. If
the Bell Company had sold its stock at the highest price reached, in
1880, it would have received less than nine million dollars--a huge
sum, but not too much to pay for the invention of the telephone and the
building up of a new art and a new industry. It was not as much as the
value of the eggs laid during the last twelve months by the hens of
Iowa.

But, as may be imagined, when the news of the Western Union agreement
became known, the