Short answers, pulled from the story.
Henry Oldenburg published the first issue of Philosophical Transactions in 1665. This German-born British philosopher established a system where experts evaluated manuscripts before publication. His work laid the foundation for what we now call peer review.
California became the only U.S. state to mandate scientific peer review in 1997. Governor signed Senate Bill 1320 into law requiring independent external scientific peer review before rule adoption. This requirement is incorporated into the California Health and Safety Code Section 57004.
Ishāq ibn ɑlī al-Ruhāwī wrote about these early methods in his text Ethics of the Physician between 854 and 931. He described how visiting physicians had to duplicate their patient records on every visit. A local council would then examine those notes once the patient was cured or died.
Technical peer reviews are conducted by a team of peers with assigned roles that are usually limited to six or fewer people. These teams represent areas of life cycle affected by material being reviewed. Reviews occur within development phases between milestone reviews on completed products or portions thereof.
The European Union started a program of peer reviews in social inclusion fields in 2004. Each program sponsors about eight peer review meetings annually. A host country lays a given policy open to examination by half a dozen other countries and relevant NGOs.