Crazy. There is also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower#...

Generally yes and even today, if you've got a twisted pair, it's that down to the exchange. Though party lines were also a thing a very long time ago.

There were also specialist circuits (e.g. EPS) where you had a physical line from end to end (with a couple of amps along the way on longer runs).

That mention of EPS takes me back, we used to use it all over the place to form basic hub-and-spoke networks in areas where we had lots of small sites that would all connect to a single exchange. It would generally bounce along at 2Mbps which wasn't bad in those days.

We also had some large campus type sites where we would sometimes implement EPS to do LAN extension over the onsite twisted pair as it was cheaper than installing fibre and just about fast enough.