Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word caricature comes from the Italian verb caricare, which means to charge or load. An early definition appears in the English doctor Thomas Browne's Christian Morals published posthumously in 1716 stating the word essentially means a loaded portrait.
Pier Leone Ghezzi popularized caricatura as an art form in eighteenth-century Italy among aristocratic circles. These portraits passed around for mutual enjoyment spread to Britain via visitors returning from the Grand Tour.
Published from 1868 to 1914 the London weekly magazine Vanity Fair featured famous society figures. Carlo Pellegrini worked under the pseudonym Ape as a leading artist for Vanity Fair between 1868 and 1914.
A milestone in formally defining caricature occurred in Susan Brennan's master thesis from 1982 at MIT Media Lab. Her system formalized caricature as exaggerating differences from an average face by subtracting points on the mean face and scaling the difference.
The first museum of caricature in the Arab world opened in March 2009 at Fayoum Egypt. Museums dedicated to the art exist throughout the world including the Museo de la Caricatura in Mexico City and the Muzeum Karykatury operating in Warsaw.