On This Day October 7

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History Highlights
History Highlights

1913 – The moving assembly line is introduced at Ford Motor Company’s  Highland Park factory outside Detroit. Henry Ford’s invention allowed workers to build a Model T from scratch in 84 steps, cutting production time from 12.5 hours to six hours, and a year later to just 93 minutes.

1968 – The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) adopts its film rating system. Movies are rated G for general audiences, M (which later becomes PG), R or X (for adults only).

1982 – “Cats” opens, becoming the longest-running production in Broadway history. The musical is based the T.S. Eliot’s 1939 collection of poems, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” and features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

1985 – Four Palestinian terrorists hijack the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean Sea. They kill a disabled American tourist, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, and order his body thrown overboard with his wheelchair.

2001 – President George W. Bush announces that a U.S.-led coalition has begun attacks on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan with an intense bombing campaign by American and British forces. The campaign, in retaliation for terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. three weeks earlier (9/11), is known as Operation Enduring Freedom.

2003 – “Terminator” actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is elected governor of California, replacing Gray Davis — the first U.S. governor to be recalled by the public since 1921. Affectionately called “The Governator,” he is reelected in 2006.