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 story of the telephone became a fairy tale of success.
Theodore Vail was given a banquet by his old-time friends in the Washington postal service, and toasted as "the Monte Cristo of the Telephone." It was said that the actual cost of the Bell plant was only one-twenty-fifth of its capital, and that every four cents of investment had thus become a dollar.

Even Jay Gould, carried beyond his usual caution by these stories, ran up to New Haven and bought its telephone company, only to find out later that its earnings were less than its expenses.
Much to the bewilderment of the Bell Company, it soon learned that the troubles of wealth are as numerous as those of poverty.