bonus question: how did this work when phone calls were still a relatively new thing?
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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
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