Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word rocket comes from the Italian rocchetta, meaning bobbin or little spindle, because the device resembled the spool used to hold thread on a spinning wheel. Leonhard Fronsperger and Conrad Haas adopted the Italian term into German in the mid-16th century, and rocket appears in English by the early 17th century.
A rocket carries all of its own propellant and produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed, so it needs no oxygen from the surrounding air. This is why a rocket can fly in the vacuum of space, where rocket engines actually operate more efficiently than inside the atmosphere.
Gunpowder-powered rockets evolved in medieval China under the Song dynasty by the 13th century, where engineers also developed an early form of multiple rocket launcher. According to Joseph Needham, the Song navy used rockets in a military exercise dated to 1245.
The V-2 was a rocket whose production began in Germany in 1943, designed at the Peenemünde Army Research Center with Wernher von Braun as technical director. It became the first artificial object to travel into space, crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on the 20th of June 1944, though the Nazis used slave labour to manufacture it.
No single rocket has yet reached the velocity needed for orbit, because tankage, structure, guidance, valves, and engines take up too great a share of takeoff mass. Launching to low Earth orbit requires about 9.7 kilometres per second of delta-v, so orbital rockets always use more than one stage, shedding empty tankage and engines during flight.
Rockets are extremely inefficient at low speeds because the exhaust carries away a huge amount of kinetic energy rearward, a problem called propulsive efficiency. A rocket flying at Mach 0.85 with an exhaust velocity of Mach 10 reaches only about 5.9 percent overall energy efficiency, against roughly 35 percent for a modern air-breathing jet engine.
The Space Shuttle generated 180 decibels of noise around its base, loud enough that reflected acoustic waves could damage or destroy the rocket. NASA built a sound suppression system that floods the launch pad with water at rates up to 900,000 gallons per minute, reducing the level from 180 decibels down to 142.