October 7 in History

Ford engineers rigged a rope-and-winch system at the Highland Park plant on October 7, 1913, dragging a Model T chassis past 140 workers who each added one component. Assembly time dropped from 12 hours 28 minutes to 93 minutes. Within a year, Ford refined the process with a mechanized belt and cut the time to 24 seconds per car. The moving assembly line wasn't invented from nothing. Meatpacking plants in Cincinnati and Chicago had used overhead conveyor systems for decades, disassembling carcasses as they moved past stationary workers. Ford reversed the idea: instead of taking apart, he put together. By 1914, Ford produced more cars than all other manufacturers combined. The $5 daily wage he introduced the same year wasn't generosity; it was the minimum needed to stop the brutal 370% annual turnover.

Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson lured Matthew Shepard from a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, on October 6, 1998, drove him to a remote area, tied him to a fence post, pistol-whipped him, and left him to die in near-freezing temperatures. A cyclist found him 18 hours later, initially mistaking him for a scarecrow. Shepard died in a Fort Collins hospital on October 12, six days after the attack. He was 21 years old. His murder galvanized the gay rights movement and drew national attention to the absence of federal hate crime protections for sexual orientation. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed into law by President Obama in 2009, eleven years after Shepard's death.

Four Palestine Liberation Front gunmen hijacked the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt on October 7, 1985, taking 400 passengers and crew hostage. When negotiations stalled, the hijackers murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound American tourist, and ordered crew members to throw his body and wheelchair overboard. After the terrorists surrendered to Egyptian authorities, who tried to fly them out of the country, U.S. Navy F-14 fighters intercepted the Egyptian Boeing 737 and forced it to land at a NATO base in Sicily. The incident caused a diplomatic crisis between the U.S., Italy, and Egypt. Abu Abbas, the PLF leader who planned the hijacking, escaped Italian custody and was eventually captured by American forces in Baghdad in 2003.

Jack Valenti killed the Hays Code on November 1, 1968, replacing 38 years of content restrictions with a rating system that gave parents information instead of giving censors power. The original four categories were G (General Audiences), M (Mature), R (Restricted), and X (No one under 17). The problem was the X rating: the MPAA never trademarked it, so pornography distributors adopted it freely. Within years, 'X-rated' meant only one thing, and legitimate films like Midnight Cowboy wore the label reluctantly. The industry replaced X with NC-17 in 1990 after Henry and June became the first film to receive the new designation. The system has been modified repeatedly since, with M becoming GP and then PG, and PG-13 added in 1984 after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom disturbed parents.

The Holy League fleet of 206 galleys met the Ottoman fleet of 230 galleys near the Gulf of Patras on October 7, 1571. The battle lasted five hours. Nearly all the fighting was hand-to-hand, with soldiers boarding enemy vessels after ramming. The Ottomans lost 210 ships captured or sunk and roughly 30,000 dead. The Christians lost 17 galleys and 7,500 men but freed an estimated 12,000 Christian galley slaves chained to Ottoman oars. Miguel de Cervantes fought aboard the Marquesa and took three arquebus shots, permanently losing the use of his left hand. He later called Lepanto 'the most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen.' The Ottomans rebuilt their fleet within a year, but they never again seriously challenged Christian naval power in the western Mediterranean.

Major Patrick Ferguson was the only British regular at the Battle of Kings Mountain on October 7, 1780. His entire force of roughly 1,100 consisted of American Loyalists. The Patriot militia, about 900 'over-mountain men' from present-day Tennessee and Virginia, surrounded the forested ridge and attacked uphill from all sides. Ferguson refused to surrender, rallying his troops with a silver whistle. He was killed leading a breakout charge, shot from his horse by multiple riflemen. The battle lasted 65 minutes. Every Loyalist was killed, wounded, or captured. Cornwallis called it 'the first link in a chain of evils' and retreated into South Carolina, abandoning his invasion of North Carolina. Kings Mountain is often cited as the turning point of the war in the South.