Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oboe tunes the orchestra because its pitch is secure and its penetrating sound carries over the noise of warming-up musicians, according to the League of American Orchestras. The first oboist plays a concert A, and the rest of the ensemble matches to it.
The modern standard oboe is most commonly made from grenadilla, also known as African blackwood. Some makers also use other species of the genus Dalbergia, including cocobolo, rosewood, and violetwood. Student models are often made from plastic resin to reduce cost and increase durability.
Most professional oboists make their own reeds to control tone color, intonation, and responsiveness precisely. The individual nature of each reed means that small variations in cane, scrape, length, and environmental conditions all affect the sound, making hand-crafted reeds preferable to commercial alternatives for professional use.
The spelling oboe was adopted into English around 1770 from the Italian oboè, which was a transliteration of the 17th-century French pronunciation of hautbois. Hautbois is a compound of haut, meaning high or loud, and bois, meaning wood or woodwind, so the word translates roughly as high-pitched woodwind.
The Viennese oboe has a wider internal bore, a shorter and broader reed, and a different fingering system than the conservatoire oboe. It retains more of the tonal character of historical instruments. The conservatoire oboe, developed by the Triébert family of Paris in the 19th century, is used almost everywhere outside Vienna and carries up to 45 pieces of keywork in its full configuration.
The oboe family includes the cor anglais (English horn), pitched a perfect fifth lower in F; the oboe d'amore, pitched a minor third lower in A; the bass oboe, sounding an octave below the standard instrument; the heckelphone, of which only 165 have ever been made; the piccolo oboe or musette at the top; and the contrabass oboe, pitched two octaves below the standard oboe.