I find this a great fun thing to think about. Binary is not 1s and 0s in the way you talk about it.

Imagine there is a quantity, I can tell you what quantity it is in many different ways:

Nine in English

in English Neuf in French

in French 9 in Arabic numerals

in Arabic numerals IX in Roman numerals

in Roman numerals 1001 in Binary with Arabic numerals

in Binary with Arabic numerals on off off on in Binary with on/off

in Binary with on/off high low low high in Binary represented with voltages or levers or water levels or electric charge ... or English words 'high' and 'low'

They all represent the same thing. The point here is that binary is not 1s and 0s, that's only one way to represent of a value.

When you talk of converting a H into binary, you probably imagine seeing 10101010 on screen - but that's not "binary", that's one digit for each binary bit.

Yes, if you converted H to "binary" as people normally talk about it, and then represented that in Arabic digits and then stored it, it would take more space in the same way that converting H to aitch takes more space.

But you can see that binary is one way of representing a quantity, well by that logic saying "if I converted H to binary and represented it as high low high low high low high low then it would take 35 characters! That's even more than 10101010 ! But these two are both 'binary' .. so how is one bigger than the other?

The other side of this is to wonder how H is stored by a computer, and to see that H is itself just a way of representing a quantity - the same quantity 72 , 01001000 , or seventy two or ASCII character code H . Which is 8bittree's answer that plain text is binary, but this is me trying to show what that means.

So you get a bit pattern in a computer 01001000 and what does it mean? Anything - could be talked about as a number, as a part of a zip file, as a character, depends what the intent of the person who created it was. If you know it's supposed to be plain text, then it came from a character encoding H -> 01001000 and you look it up the other way in the character encoding table - ASCII, UTF-8, shift-jis, etc. and find the right font character and out comes a H or whatever. Or out comes the wrong character if you use a different encoding lookup than the person who created it used. This is @Eric Lippert's link.