Why is it the number 1 and zero on telephones were not assigned any letter of the alphabet?

Question

The reason why I asked this is that some companies or people choose their numbers selectively e.g. 1 800 I-HOPE-SO. In the exanmple 1 and zero could have given more message to the phone number had there been letters assigned to them. My previous number was 3181007. James Bond would have loved that if number 1 had a corresponding letter.

Answer 1

It turns out that Bell wanted to reserve 0 and 1 for special "flag" functions when used in the first couple of positions in the dialing sequence. 0, of course, is used to signal the operator. An initial 1 nowadays indicates a long distance number and is also used in shorthand numbers as 411 (directory assistance), 611 (phone repair), 911 (emergency dispatch), and 011 (international long-distance access). Until a few years ago, the second digit of every area code was either a 0 or a 1, another cue for the switching computers. (Starting all long distance numbers with 1 eliminated the need for this practice and made it possible to create many more area codes, but that's a topic for another day.) Assigning letters to the number 1 would have meant that it occasionally would be used as one of the first two digits of an ordinary local call, which would have fouled up the routing system.

Answer 2

Letters were originally used to indicate the exchanges (as a kid, my number was Parkway 6 - XXXX -- the Parkway became PA -- and then 72).

That means that the letters were the first numbers dialled when making a local call. Zero and one were reserved (zero was used to get the operator and one was used for long distance). If letters were assigned to zero or one, they couldn't be used to indicate an exchange.