Short answers, pulled from the story.
Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope toward Saturn in 1610 and described the appendages as three planets touching one another. He called these strange features Saturn's ears before they disappeared from view by 1612.
Christiaan Huygens published Systema Saturnium in 1659 revealing that Saturn was surrounded by a thin flat ring nowhere touching the body of the planet. He designed a 43× power refracting telescope to provide unprecedented detail of this structure.
James Clerk Maxwell submitted an entry for the Adams prize from the University of Cambridge in 1856. He demonstrated that a nonuniform solid ring or continuous fluid ring could not remain stable and concluded the ring must be composed of numerous small particles independently orbiting Saturn.
The dense main rings extend from 67,000 to 140,000 kilometers away from Saturn's equator. Local thickness ranges from as little as 10 meters to as much as 1 kilometer and they are composed of 99.9% pure water ice with impurities that may include tholins or silicates.
Small moon Daphnis was discovered on the 1st of May 2005 and orbits within the Keeler Gap keeping it clear. The Keeler Gap is 42 kilometers wide located 250 kilometers from the outer edge of the A Ring.