The French government awarded the Alessandro Volta Prize to Alexander Graham Bell for his patent on the first telephone. The prize would then be awarded by the U.S. Senate, over a century later, to Antonio Meucci (an Italian living in New York, and a friend of Giuseppe Garibaldi). With the money from the Volta Prize, Bell founded Volta Labs, which would later become Bell Labs, the home of many 20th-century inventions, including the most important: the transistor. What if it had been awarded to Meucci instead?
