In August, 1876, Bell demonstrated that his telephone could work over long distances. His first message was sent from the telegraph office in Mount Pleasant to Brantford five miles away. Bell introduced his invention to the scientific community and the general public and also at the 1876 Centenary Exhibition in Philadelphia. Pedro II of Brazil ordered one hundred telephones for his country. Bell, Hubbard, and Sanders wanted to sell the patent to Western Union for $100,000, but the company's president declined the offer. (Afterward, he regretted his decision, saying that paying $25 million for the patent would have been a bargain.) In 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was established, and a few days later Bell married Mabel Hubbard. They had four children: two girls, and two boys who died in infancy.

In 1880, the French Academy, representing the French government, presented Bell the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs ($10,000) for his invention. With this money, Bell established the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Other honors included the Albert Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in London, an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Wurzburg (Germany), the Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and induction into the Legion of Honor.

Named after Bell, the decibel (dB), equal to 0.1 bel (B), is a unit for measuring sound intensity. Also named for him is the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, established in 1976 to award contributors in the fields of telecommunications. Bell was issued fourteen patents for the telephone and the telegraph and four patents for the photophone, which transmits speech by light rays. He shared twelve other patents with his collaborators for the phonograph, aerial vehicles, hydroairplanes, and selenium cells. Other inventions included the audiometer, which measures acuity in hearing, and the induction balance, used to locate metal objects in human bodies.

Bell became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882. He alternated between two homes--Washington, D.C., and his private estate Beinn Bhreagh ("beautiful mountain" in Gaelic) in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Bell has been claimed as a "native son" by the United States and Canada. Canada maintains the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Nova Scotia, the historic Bell Homestead, and the world's first telephone company building. Collections of Bell's documents reside at the U.S. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, and at the Alexander Graham Bell Institute at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia. . .

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