Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sputnik 1 was launched by the Soviet Union on the 4th of October 1957 at 19:28:34 UTC from Site No. 1 at the 5th Tyuratam range in Kazakh SSR, now known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was carried into orbit by a modified R-7 rocket designated 8K71PS.
Sputnik 1 broadcast radio pulses on 20.005 and 40.002 MHz for 22 days until its three silver-zinc batteries depleted on the 26th of October 1957. It completed 1,440 orbits of the Earth over three months, travelling approximately 70,000,000 km before burning up on the 4th of January 1958.
Sputnik 1 was a polished aluminium-magnesium-titanium sphere 585 mm in diameter, with a mass of 83.6 kg. It had four antenna whips extending outward and was pressurised with dry nitrogen to 1.3 atmospheres.
The Sputnik crisis was the wave of public anxiety in the United States triggered by the unexpected Soviet launch. It led directly to the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in February 1958, the establishment of NASA, and the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which funded low-interest college loans for students studying mathematics and science.
Physicists William Guier and George Weiffenbach at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory discovered they could pinpoint Sputnik's orbital position by analysing the Doppler shift in its radio signals. Their deputy director Frank McClure then asked them to solve the inverse problem, leading to the TRANSIT satellite navigation system, the direct forerunner of the Global Positioning System.
At least two backup units from the original Soviet program survive: one in the corporate museum of Energia near Moscow and a flight-ready backup at the Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas. Replicas are on display at the National Air and Space Museum in the United States, the Science Museum in the United Kingdom, the Powerhouse Museum in Australia, and outside the Russian embassy in Spain.