So when the first cable was laid under the Atlantic and people tried to make a transcontinental telephone call, the sound came out skewed in time, noisy and garbled.
This is fiction. For one thing, the first transatlantic cables preceded telephony and were used only for telegraph.
... they consulted the best physicists out there, including one guy in England (forget his name) who was a student of Maxwell. He proposed that the cable insulation material, not the conductor, was the problem, which turned out to be true. The dielectric was distorting the sound ...
Again, fiction. Telegraphs work with dots and dashes, so I’m not sure how you think the sound was "distorted." The insulator did fail but there was nothing exotic about the failure - the material simply couldn’t withstand the environment and it decayed.
The first transatlantic telephone cables were installed in the 1950s and worked reliably well into the 1970s.