Events
in 1820
The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos.
Aphrodite of Milos, better known as the Venus de Milo, is an ancient Greek statue and one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture. Created at some time between 130 and 100 BC, it is believed to depict Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans) the Greek goddess of love and beauty. It is a marble sculpture, slightly larger than life size at 203 cm (6 ft 8 in) high. Its arms and original plinth have been lost. From an inscription that was on its plinth, it is thought to be the work of Alexandros of Antioch; it was earlier mistakenly attributed to the master sculptor Praxiteles. It is currently on permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Venus de Milo,
Melos
in 1864
Battle of Mansfield – Union forces are thwarted by the Confederate army at Mansfield, Louisiana.
The Battle of Mansfield, also known as the Battle of Sabine Crossroads, occurred on April 8, 1864, in De Soto Parish, Louisiana. Confederate forces commanded by Richard Taylor attacked a Union army commanded by Nathaniel Banks a few miles outside the town of Mansfield, near Sabine Crossroads. The Union forces held their positions for a short time before being overwhelmed by Confederate attacks and driven from the field. The battle was a decisive Confederate victory which stopped the advance of the Union army's Red River Campaign during the American Civil War.
battle,
Mansfield,
American Civil War
in 1911
Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.
Superconductivity is a phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic fields occurring in certain materials when cooled below a characteristic critical temperature. It was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes on April 8, 1911 in Leiden. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a quantum mechanical phenomenon. It is characterized by the Meissner effect, the complete ejection of magnetic field lines from the interior of the superconductor as it transitions into the superconducting state. The occurrence of the Meissner effect indicates that superconductivity cannot be understood simply as the idealization of
perfect conductivity in classical physics.
superconductivity
Births
in 1692
Giuseppe Tartini was an Italian baroque composer and violinist.

in 1818
August Wilhelm von Hofmann was a German chemist.

in 1831
Jem Mace was an English boxing champion. He was born at Beeston, Norfolk. Although nicknamed "The Gypsy", he denied Romani ethnicity in his autobiography. A middleweight, he succeeded in outboxing heavier opponents thanks to his dancing style, clever defensive tactics and powerful, accurate punching.
Deaths
in 1848
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas
L'elisir d'amore (1832),
Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and
Don Pasquale (1843), all in Italian, and the French operas
La favorite and
La fille du régiment (both from 1840). Along with Vincenzo Bellini and Gioachino Rossini, he was a leading composer of
bel canto opera.

in 1861
Elisha Graves Otis was an American industrialist, founder of the Otis Elevator Company, and inventor of a safety device that prevents elevators from falling if the hoisting cable fails. He worked on this device while living in Yonkers, New York in 1852, and had a finished product in 1854.

in 1984
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was a leading Soviet physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.