To prevent wire corrosion.

Most phone wire is copper, and it is stripped and exposed to air at many points along its path from the telephone company central office to your phone. Also, breaks in insulation could expose small parts of it to water or soil. Any of these will allow the wire to corrode, and the usual methods of corrosion are that copper in the wire is converted to copper oxide or copper carbonate. Both of those happen as a chemical reaction where copper atoms act as positively charged ions to combine with negatively charged oxygen or carbonate ions in water or dirt. A wire with a positive charge will actually draw the negatively charged ions to the wire and will greatly accelerate corrosion. A negative charge will repel the corrosive ions and will slow the corrosion. A negative charge will cause some copper to be lost due to a process called electro-deplating (reverse of electroplating), but the rate of copper loss is much less than would be caused by copper corrosion with a positive charge. The phone company power supply acts like a giant battery. They ground the positive site of the supply so that any part of the system has a voltage that is zero or negative, so the whole system resists corrosion better and lasts longer.

During older days, telephone cables used to be laid underground. We know that when two metals are at different voltages then electro - depositing process starts and ions of metal at high potential start depositing on metal at low potential. This was the reason telephone circuitry used to be fed -ve supply in earlier days to maintain cables at low potential in comparison to the Earth to stop the gradual decay of telephone cables. All the communication related circuits developed afterwards supported the same practice of maintaining -ve supply to communication system. This is the reason most of the communication systems available today use -ve supply as a power source.

The higher the voltage used in telephone systems, the longer the distance from the exchange at which a telephone handset can be operated (to overcome voltage drop along the line). High voltages however can be a hazard to users of telephone equipment and technicians working on lines which were traditionally uninsulated and worked on live. 48 volts is a compromise between safety and transmission range. The 48 volts came from the use of lead acid cells. 24 lead acid cells in series approx 48 volts. The positive or tip wire of a telephone wire is grounded at the exchange and the ring wire is at a potential of minus 48 volts. The reason for this is to prevent electrolysis causing corrosion of copper wires which occurs if the tip line is positive with respect to ground.