bonus question: how did this work when phone calls were still a relatively new thing?
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Because instead of sending the sound, we convert those sounds into electricity that can travel at the speed of light. Then when the electricity arrives we convert it back into sound
Phone calls convert Sound, which is pressure waves traveling through the air, into electrical signals which can travel at around the speed of light or so, until they get to the other end where they are converted back into pressure waves on the other end.
It worked basically the same way back then as it does now, but these days we can send a phone signal over the internet instead of just through telephone lines.
Phones use electricity to transmit information. They don’t use sound. The sound is basically recorded at your microphone, and then sent at the speed of light to the other person, and their speaker plays the recorded sound back to them.
The sound from your voice is converted to electrical signals which are able to travel much faster (around 670 million miles per hour) and is then converted back to sound the other party can hear on their end.
Phone calls convert your voice into a signal that travels at or very close to the speed of sound. With older phones it could be an electrical signal, and in the *really* early days your phone line went to a switchboard where an operator had to plug your phone line to the other line to connect you. These days all that’s automated, and with cell phones it’s radio waves to the towers, those can be converted to signals that travel through land lines and then they go back to radio signals to broadcast to the destination phone. And the speed of light is much, much faster than the speed of sound.
Phone calls don’t travel at the speed of sound, they travel at the speed of light.
When you talk into the phone your voice is translated by the microphone into an electrical signal which then moves down the phone line to the destination. It is then translated back into sound by the speaker.
Electricity moves at the speed of light.
>how did this work when phone calls were still a relatively new thing?
Digital telephones are a new thing, like Skype or Zoom, or cellphones but regular old phone lines are still analog.
Your phones analog (electrical) signal is translated into a digital signal (1’s and 0’s) and then back to analog for long distance calling. But direct local calling is often still mostly analog.
While the switching technology (dialing a phone number) has changed the actual analog mechanism for a phone hasn’t really changed since phones were first invented.
For a long time when you made a call you didn’t dial, you spoke to an operator that manually connected your phone line to another with a patch cord. Automated exchanges have existed since 1892 but manual phone operators where still in use in a lot of places in the 60’s and 70’s
Only way your question would work is if you tried to shout from San Francisco to New York.
Then, yes, your voice would be travelling, as sound, at 767 mph and would take hours to get to NY.
But what actually happens is, as many have said, your voice jumps into the Millenium Falcon and gets to NY in milliseconds, then jumps out of the Falcon and becomes sound again.
Bonus points: this works because the fluctuating electrical signals are used to make an electrical magnet turn on and off really fast, which makes a thin metal disc vibrate, bingo, you have a speaker that reproduces the sounds.
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