Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known pottery vessel dates back to 20,000 to 19,000 years before the present. This vessel was discovered in Xianren Cave in Jiangxi, China, and proves that hunter-gatherers shaped clay into containers long before the Neolithic revolution.
The earliest potter's wheel emerged from the Cucuteni, Trypillia culture in western Ukraine during the middle of the 5th millennium BC. The wheel was also invented in Mesopotamia sometime between 6,000 and 4,000 BC during the Ubaid period.
Porcelain requires firing temperatures between 1,200 °C and 1,400 °C. Earthenware is fired as low as 600 °C, while the higher temperatures for porcelain alter the physical, chemical, and mineralogical properties of the body to form the mineral mullite.
The city of Stoke-on-Trent is widely known as The Potteries because of the large number of pottery factories or Pot Banks. As early as 1785, two hundred pottery manufacturers in this region employed 20,000 workers.
Potter's rot is the colloquial name for silicosis, an occupational lung disease caused by inhaling large amounts of crystalline silica dust. Workers in the ceramic industry developed this condition due to exposure to silica dust in raw materials, with negative effects noted less than 10 years after calcined flint was introduced to the British ceramics industry in 1720.
Modern 3D printing involves the layered deposition of soft clay body similar to fused deposition modelling. The technique uses powder binding where clay body in dry powder form is fused together layer upon layer with a liquid.