Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. The initial five founders, as described by Anthony Di Iorio, were Buterin, Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit, joining in December 2013. Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke were added as founders in early 2014.
Ethereum officially launched on the 30th of July 2015 with the release codenamed "Frontier". The genesis block contained 8,893 transactions allocating various amounts of ether to different addresses, along with a block reward of 5 ETH.
The Merge was the transition of Ethereum's consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, completed at block 15537393 on the 15th of September 2022. It cut Ethereum's energy consumption by over 99%.
ERC-721 is the first official non-fungible token standard on Ethereum, published in January 2018 under the leadership of William Entriken. It established a common interface for unique, indivisible tokens, enabling the multi-billion dollar digital collectibles market.
In June 2016, an unknown hacker exploited a vulnerability in The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization built on Ethereum, stealing a large portion of its tokens. Researchers Emin Gün Sirer, Vlad Zamfir, and Dino Mark had warned of the vulnerability beforehand. The community responded with a hard fork that reversed the theft, splitting the network into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum's Layer 1 averages around 25 transactions per second, with a theoretical maximum of 238 TPS under its current parameters. By comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second. Layer 2 chains built on top of Ethereum can process thousands of transactions per second while inheriting the base layer's security.