Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest discovered bricks were found at Tell Aswad in the upper Tigris region and southeast Anatolia close to Diyarbakir, dating before 7500 BC. These early units were made from shaped mud and dried in the sun rather than fired in a kiln.
Ceramic or fired brick was used in early Indus Valley cities like Kalibangan by 3000 BC. The brick sizes throughout the Indus Valley region conformed to a 1:2:4 thickness, width, and length ratio.
Richard A. Ver Valen of Haverstraw, New York, patented the first brick-making machine in 1852. Henry Clayton later patented a machine in 1855 that could produce up to 25,000 bricks daily with minimal supervision.
The color of fired clay bricks is influenced by the chemical and mineral content of the raw materials, the firing temperature, and the atmosphere in the kiln. As the temperature increases to around 1000 degrees Celsius, the color moves to brown or grey.
The usual size of a modern brick from 1965 in the United Kingdom is 215 by 102.5 by 65 millimeters. With a nominal 10 millimeter mortar joint, this forms a unit size of 225 by 112.5 by 75 millimeters for a ratio of 6:3:2.
The use of brickwork declined in some areas due to concerns about earthquakes following events like the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Unreinforced brick masonry was found to be weak during seismic events because the mortar cracks and crumbles.