According to, How the Telephone was Invented, Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Bell grew up surrounded by a family of experts in elocution and speech therapy which is what first peaked his interests in dealing with communication. After moving to Canada and Boston in 1870, Bell decided to follow in his family's footsteps and became a practitioner of speech therapy, specializing in teaching deaf children how to speak. Among Bell's students was Helen Keller, who was not only blind and deaf but also mute at the time of their first encounter. Along with his invention of the telephone, History.com explains Bell's other credited inventions including: the metal detector, the photophone, the graphophone, and the audiometer.
Bell's involvement with the deaf community and his meticulous examination of sound and the human voice, ultimately inspired him to create the telephone. Intrigued by Samuel Morse's telegraph, Bell aimed to enhance the concept of transmitting communication by applying his knowledge of sound and speech.
The telegraph and telephone are electrical systems that rely on wires. Alexander Graham Bell's inventions of the telephone was a result of his efforts to improve the telegraph. While the telegraph had been around for about 30 years and was a successful system, it could only send and receive one message at a time. Bell's extensive knowledge of sound and music enabled him to consider the possibility of transmitting multiple messages over the same wire simultaneously. The concept of a "multiple telegraph" had been suggested before, but nobody had been able to create one until Bell. He came up with the "harmonic telegraph," which was based on the idea that multiple notes or signals of different pitches could be sent at the same time over the same wire. See Britannica for more information about the concept and engineering of the telephone. 
On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson were granted their patent for the first ever telephone. By 1877, the Bell Telephone Company, which is currently known as AT&T, was established and in 1915, Watson received the first transcontinental phone call from New York City to San Francisco , made by Bell.
The original telephone completely changed the speed of America and revolutionized communication as we know it. Prior to the telephone, communication was limited to face-to-face- interactions, written letters, and telegraphy, which could be slow and time consuming. The telephone enabled people to communicate with others who were not physically present, which had profound impact on businesses, families, and friend separated by long distance. Telephone technology paved the way to other important inventions such as cellular phones and the internet.
economics depends on communication, and the telephones invention had a profound impact on the way we conduct business. It would be impossible nowadays for modern businesses to operate without phone communication. Both customers and employees depend on phones to communicate. We also depend on phones to find job opportunities. Anything that we do now online and with the internet is all thanks to the impact the telephone has had on our world.
There is no necessarily negative effects that the telephone had at the time, it was a great discovery. However, the way phones and the media are used now is toxic. A fun fact is that Alexander Graham Bell actually refused to ever have a telephone throughout his entire life because he thought it would distract him from his work. I wonder what he would think if he saw how people used phones now.
"The inventor looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization." - Alexander Graham Bell
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