It saves valuable time in an emergency. According to nationwide statistics, it can take up to 2 1/2 minutes to find your telephone directory (phone book) and another minute to locate the correct number. In an emergency, 3 minutes is a really long @ss time---time that can be saved by remembering to call 911.

u know... i have no idea,

this explains it

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question664.htm

When i used to live in Russia, we had different numbers for different emergencies:
01-Fire Department
02-Police
03-Ambulance

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I'm not up on the American phone system but I imagine you get a different operator.

If you dial 000 here, you get the 'emergency operator' who asks "Police, Fire or Ambulance".

So I'd say, as a guess, that when you dial 911, you get an emergency operator. When you dial 0, you get a 'general operator' who can connect calls, solve problems etc.  

P.S. I've only just realised the significance of the emergency number 911 and the date 9/11. Of course in Australia and the UK September 11th is express the other way 'round (11/9).

  I always figured it was '911' because the numbers are seperated by the rest of the keypad on all phones, therefore making it rather difficult to dial '911' by mistake.

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I think this was the original idea with 999. On the old dial phones it would be much more difficult to dial 999 by accident than with any other repeated number. The same would apply if a small child was playing with the phone. The problem arose when dials were replaced with push buttons.

we have the following emergency numbers in germany:

110 - police
112 - fire department
19222 (can vary from region to region) - ambulance