For someone not familiar with morse or pulse dialing, how does one do that?
So think of the cradle switches - what "hangs up" the phone - as a button, and you just click that button (quickly) for '1' and then you pause and hit it twice in very rapid succession for '2' ...
You need to be on a POTS line to do this, of course, but it will work even today. Even if you have no dialing mechanism, you can dial the phone this way ...
To dial a 0, pulse the line 10 times.
This brings back memories, this is a trick people my age group mastered as teenagers in a 3rd world country. All calls were billed - including local ones, so parents would commonly get lockable cages that would cover the buttons/rotary dial to prevent unauthorised calls in their absence. The cages would leave the receiver accessible even when locked in order to be able to receive calls, so we would use the hook to do pulse tone dialing; dialing a number with many zeroes was always a challenge since it required 10 rapid taps as part of a longer sequence, but I built up muscle memory.
The practice was colloquially named 'tap-dialing' and it was handed down from generation to generation. Sadly it came to an end in the smartphone world.
https://www.epanorama.net/circuits/telephone_ringer.html:
”The voltage at the subscribers end depends upon loop length and number of ringers attached to the line; it could be between 40 and 150 Volts.”
I think they also (relatively to the hardware in a VoIP adapter) need a large amount of power.
So, to ring that bell, you need to transform your 5V/3V/…, and you need a larger power circuit. That isn’t worth it for the few who still have an old-style telephone.