After the film was released, the telephone was commonly called the "Ameche", a slang term referring to actor Don Ameche who played the telephone's inventor. This association is explained in the film Ball of Fire (1941), showing the term was still in use two years after the release of the original film.
One of the stories in the movie, that is set in 1873, is that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone "in his youth". But the first telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci in 1860 and Johann Philipp Reis in 1861, who also called his device "telephone", not Bell as it's stated in the movie. Bell didn't invented THE telephone but A telephone, the Bell-telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell: Your honor... Have I committed some offense by starving in an attic? by spending sleepless nights at my work? by being too poor to own a decent scrap of paper, on which to tell her of my love? I have sat here for days and heard myself called liar, thief, fraud and cheat. I've seen my friends humiliated, my invention belittled, just as I have seen my business destroyed by methods which must leave every honest man appalled.
Alexander Graham Bell: ...shall the lonely scientist, the man who dreams, and out of his dreams benefits the world, is he, that often half-starved, lonely little man, to be told the world has no need of him the moment his work is done?