Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known bricks, dating to before 7500 BC, were found at Tell Aswad in the upper Tigris region and in southeast Anatolia close to Diyarbakir. They were made from shaped mud and dried rather than fired.
Mesopotamia discovered fired brick between 5000 and 4500 BC. In China, fired bricks appeared around 4400 BC at Chengtoushan, a settlement of the Daxi culture.
Richard A. Ver Valen of Haverstraw, New York, patented the first brick-making machine in 1852. Henry Clayton then patented a machine in 1855 capable of producing up to 25,000 bricks daily.
By the end of the 19th century, the Hudson River region of New York State was the world's largest brick manufacturing area, with 130 brickyards employing 8,000 people and producing roughly 1 billion bricks a year at peak output.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the 1933 Long Beach earthquake revealed that unreinforced brick masonry fails in seismic events because mortar cracks and bricks lose their binding. Many jurisdictions have since mandated retrofitting of older unreinforced masonry structures.
Calcium-silicate bricks are made with lime binding sand, quartz, or crushed flint rather than clay, and are cured in an autoclave for three to fourteen hours. They are common in Sweden, Russia, and other post-Soviet countries, especially in buildings constructed or renovated in the 1970s.