Sesame Street Premieres on Public TV

On November 10, 1969, the Children's Television Workshop put a fictional Manhattan block on public television and called it Sesame Street. Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett had spent three years testing whether the techniques Madison Avenue used to sell cereal on Saturday morning could instead teach a four-year-old her letters and numbers, especially kids from low-income families nobody else in children's programming was really making television for. The show set itself on a fictional Upper West Side block, its brownstone designed to look like an ordinary New York building, and paired live actors with Muppets built by Jim Henson. It aired on National Educational Television, the network PBS absorbed the following year, reaching only about two thirds of American television sets but still pulling a 3.3 Nielsen rating worth 1.9 million households on its very first morning.