Lloyd Morrisett -- co-creator of the beloved, long-running children's educational television series Sesame Street -- has passed away. He was 93 years old.Sesame Workshop confirmed Morrisett's passing in a post to social media. "Sesame Workshop mourns the passing of our esteemed and beloved co-founder Lloyd N. Morrisett, PhD, who died at the age of 93," the company wrote. Morrisett's cause of death has not been publicly revealed.

"A Lifetime Honorary Trustee, Lloyd leaves an outsized and indelible legacy among generations of children the world over, with Sesame Street only the most visible tribute to a lifetime of good work and lasting impact," Sesame Workshop's official statement continues. "A wise, thoughtful, and above all kind leader of the Workshop for decades, Lloyd was fascinated by the power of technology and constantly thinking about new ways it could be used to educate."

According to Sesame Workshop, Joan Ganz Cooney -- Morrisett's co-founder -- said the following: "Without Lloyd Morrisett, there would be no Sesame Street. It was he who first came up with the notion of using television to teach preschoolers basic skills, such as letters and numbers. He was a trusted partner and loyal friend to me for over fifty years, and he will be sorely missed."

Lloyd N. Morrisett Jr. was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on Nov. 2, 1929. He graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in philosophy in 1951 before going on to receive a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale University. In 1956, Morrisett began teaching at the School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, though was initially unimpressed with academic life. He then worked at the Social Science Research Council from 1958 to 1959. This led Morrisett to the Carnegie Corporation, where he developed a specialty in early education.

The spark for what would become Sesame Street came in December 1965, when Morrisett noticed something while his three-year-old daughter, Sarah, was sitting in front of the television, waiting for her morning cartoons to start. "Sarah Morrisett had memorized an entire repertoire of TV jingles," Michael Davis wrote in his 2008 book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street (which was later adapted into the 2021 documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street). "It is not too far a stretch to say that Sarah's mastery of jingles led to a central hypothesis of the great experiment that we know as Sesame Street: if television could successfully teach the words and music to advertisements, couldn't it teach children more substantive material by co-opting the very elements that made ads so effective?"

Morrisett presented his hypothesis to the aforementioned Cooney -- a TV writer and producer -- at a dinner party at her apartment in February 1966. Cooney agreed to hear Morrisett out further, with the two going on to form the Children's Television Workshop -- now known as Sesame Workshop -- in 1968. Starring the Muppet characters created by the late, great Jim Henson, Cooney and Morrisett's Sesame Street premiered in 1969. The educational children's series is still ongoing to this very day, with well over 4,000 episodes under its belt. As of 2021, the show has won 222 Emmy Awards, as well as 11 Grammy Awards. In 2019, Cooney and Morrisett also received Kennedy Center Honors for their work on Sesame Street, marking the first time a TV show had been honored at the event.

Source: Twitter, via The Hollywood Reporter