One of the enduring questions of November 10 is Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street? Today is the anniversary of the show. In 1969 it was a big departure from the children’s TV shows of the time, but by now it’s the gold standard, having won 189 Emmy Awards. One of its big departures was the music it featured — it’s also won 11 Grammys.
Sesame Street first came up in discussions in 1966 when Joan Ganz Cooney, a TV producer, was talking to Lloyd Morrisett, a VP of the Carnegie Foundation, about trying to do something productive and worthwhile with television. Maybe, they thought, television could help children get prepared for school. They kept thinking about it and doing the odd experiment here and there for the next two years, and finally put together a proposal and got an $8 million grant, jointly funded by several foundations. The show debuted the next year, and it’s been going ever since — over 4,500 episodes and still counting.
With that many episodes, the writers had to keep coming up with new ideas for skits featuring the Muppets. One of them was a riff on the old story of Stanley and Livingstone — you’ll recall that one. Dr. Livingstone had apparently disappeared while exploring Africa to find the source of the Nile River, and Stanley managed to find him. Stanley’s legendary line (which he probably didn’t really deliver) was “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Except that the two men involved might have added the famous phrase sometime later, the basic story is true — it happened in 1871, and today is the anniversary of the meeting.
Finding Dr. Livingstone, who was a famous missionary and explorer, was big news in 1871, and made all the headlines. It took quite some time, of course, for the story to make its way out of the jungle. If they’d just thought to string a thousand miles or so of wire and bring a telegraph set, they could have let everyone know right away. That’s what happened on November 10, 1918 in the Western Union office in Nova Scotia — they received a top-secret telegram from Europe revealing that WWI was going to end in an armistice the very next day. Sometimes system administrators get to know things before anyone else.
Livingstone had been out of contact in the African jungle for six years by the time Stanley tracked him down. He was mainly there as a missionary, trying to convert people to Christianity. That’s an effort that has met with mixed reactions over the centuries, with one of the most extreme reactions coming in the French Revolution. In order to replace Catholicism, which the revolutionaries saw as complicit in the crimes of the French ruling class, the Cult of Reason was founded in 1793. On November tenth, of course. It was intended to be an “atheistic religion” (whatever that is) sponsored by the new state. It didn’t really catch on very well, maybe because having an atheistic religion was a bit hard to understand. Or maybe it was just the lack of fun new holidays like Festivus; the French Revolution didn’t have much of a sense of humor. They weren’t going back to Catholicism, though, and after just a year the Cult of Reason was supplanted by the Cult of the Supreme Being. That one hung around a bit longer, but in 1802 Napoleon banned both of them.
November 10 features some more recent events worth noting, too. For instance, the fact that anybody in the US can directly phone anybody else in the country, even if they live on opposite coasts, is thanks to the North American Numbering Plan, which was rolled out on this day in 1951. That’s the source of what everybody recognizes as North American phone numbers, with three-digit area codes, three-digit central office codes, and four-digit station numbers.
The leading “1” (the international calling code for the US) wasn’t formally added until 1988, which meant that when Bill Gates introduced Windows 1.0 in 1983 (on November 10), you would have had to talk to an operator to call your international friends to tell them the news. Windows 1.0 wasn’t very noteworthy at the time, so the telephone exchanges of the world weren’t brought to their knees by an unanticipated flood of calls. Nevertheless, if you were one of the (very) few who actually found Windows 1.0 useful, you didn’t have to give it up until 2001 when Microsoft finally declared its end of life. Windows versions got better, though. As Elmo says on Sesame Street, “if you keep practicing, you can do anything.”
