Chapter 1: The First Brick 1. The First Brick By the fall of 2013, Scott Peters had spent nearly a quarter of his life anticipating a brick. It was the first real brick, and at a quarter before noon on the last Friday in October, on a west-facing wall in a suburb southeast of Rochester, it finally went down. There had been other bricks, but they were mere practice bricks, not permanently bonded components of an actual building. To Scott Peters, the first real machine-laid brick--not just his first but the world''s first--seemed monumental, so on the deck of a steel scaffold, he squatted, removed a glove from his right hand, held out his iPhone, and captured what people there once called a Kodak moment. Scott, thirty-five years old and over six feet tall when upright, was wearing jeans and leather boots and a mud-smudged green jacket and, to insulate himself from the cold of western New York, a warm blue beanie beneath his white hard hat. Beneath the beanie was the same close-cropped swimmer''s haircut he''d had since childhood, and beneath the haircut and a scruffy beard was a boyish, toothy, open face. As the first brick went down, he was too focused--and too exhausted--to smile.

Without saying a word, he pressed record. He captured the motion of a unique contraption. Sitting on a pair of vertically aligned roller-coaster rails, it resembled neither vehicle nor construction equipment. Ten feet tall, it loomed over everyone on the scaffold like an elephant. From one of its sides, an electrical cord, an air line, and a water hose ran to the puddled ground. From another, a mechanical crutch--a peg leg, basically--pointed down. There was cardboard taped to part of it, a heating pad wrapped around part of it, and mortar slowly leaking from another part. A massive steel cabinet hid a tangle of circuitry.

Stylewise, the contrivance had a lot more in common with a tree house cobbled together by ten-year-olds than an iMac or even a minivan. Two screen gates--more or less chicken wire--ensconced the thing, and a rolled-up silver tarp covered it. Under the tarp, a gargantuan articulated silver arm, made in Switzerland, began to bend at the elbow. Above the elbow, on the arm''s bicep, was a white sticker that said construction robotics. Below the elbow, there was a mechanical claw that grabbed a brick from a seesawish table at the end of a conveyer jutting out from the machine''s left side. The arm swung around and brought the brick to a central plastic nozzle. The machine hissed for five seconds and squirted mortar onto the bed of the brick. The brick was a utility brick, 3?" x 3?" x 11?", made in Ohio by the Belden Brick Company of clay dug from deposits laid down in the last ice age.

It contained five square holes and weighed ten pounds. It was unremarkable, and yet . The arm twisted and extended beyond the edge of the scaffold, across two wooden planks, and into the crisp autumnal air. It descended toward the left side of a short factory wall and, as it did so, rotated the butter side down. Some mortar fell off in dribbles. As the arm lowered toward a band of white stone, it slowed as if coming in for a landing, and two red laser dots appeared beside the gripper. "Holy crap," someone said. At touchdown, there was a hum, like the first half of a siren''s wail--and then the gripper opened, and the arm rose.

Someone else yelled, "Woooo!" The brick remained where it had been placed, one small part of an otherwise good-looking, weather-resistant, durable edifice. The whole movement--from pick to butter to place and back--took fifty seconds, which was, as far as paces went, far from record-setting. A human mason could have picked, buttered, lit a cigarette, taken a drag, shot the shit, scratched his ass, kept tabs on his foreman, looked out for OSHA, and still placed his brick before fifty seconds had elapsed. The world''s fastest bricklayer could have placed a couple dozen bricks in that time. Scott Peters, an engineer so persistent that he''d never put the word "that''s" before the word "impossible," said nothing. He had aspirations far beyond fifty seconds and dreams that involved much more than short factory walls. He wanted to revolutionize construction, the second-biggest industry in America. But first, he attended to the second brick, because after fifty seconds of glory, his five-thousand-pound bricklaying machine was stuck.

In the scheme of things, the inauspicious debut was a predicament of minor technical consequence, and yet a lot hung in the balance--not just for Scott but for America. Brickwork, having endured decades of decline, was disappearing. Who cared about bricks? Nobody. And everybody. Bricks strike a sociological nerve, presenting a familiar, comforting fabric in our lives. Bricks make schools feel school-like and churches church-like and factories factory-like and banks bank-like and firehouses firehouse-like; they make institutions feel institutional. Bricks give neighborhoods, and cities, and whole regions of the United States their character, to say nothing of what they grant to European countries, where bricklaying reached its greatest heights and from which American brick masonry traces its origins. No other architectural material registers so evocatively, so naturally.

Think of Williamsburg, or Fells Point, or Pioneer Square, or Chestnut Hill, or Lincoln Park, or Whittier, or the North End: Chances are, walls of baked clay units come to mind. Plop a New Yorker in Kathmandu and the Nepalese bricks cast a spell over the foreigner, suggesting he''s not so far from the Big Apple. Clay resonates. Around the world, across religions, mythology has it that God fashioned mankind out of clay. "We are the clay," Isaiah instructs. Like us, bricks are of the earth; like us, bricks breathe; and like us, each brick is imperfect but also good enough. Bricks also bear great historic significance. On some level, since the time of Noah, bricks have become unconsciously in us, of us.

In a time when the phrase "brick and mortar" evokes the quaint Main Street past, it''s easy to forget that brickwork has a lineage so long it''s been called aristocratic. Bricks, Shakespeare knew, testified for generations. "Kingdoms are clay," he wrote. The greatest city on earth owes its existence to clay, and bricks resurrected American cities from coast to coast when other materials proved unworthy. It was a brick wall that withstood the breath of the Big Bad Wolf, and it was bricks that this nation''s earliest settlers, in Jamestown and Roanoke, set to baking immediately upon their arrival. To manage water and fire, you need bricks. As one old-time brickmaker put it, everything made by brick becomes an everlasting monument, revealing "in nature''s eloquent tongue of silence . the modest virtues and worth of the maker.

" Only a fool would dare praise vinyl siding in such terms. Ever stylish, bricks command respect that the prefabricated panels of America''s strip malls do not. The way the old brickmaker saw it, "but for clay, the world would be an arid, lifeless waste." A stretch, perhaps--but a brickless civilization, for all its slickness, would in fabric and texture also feel alien, and somehow betray our humanity. Rising labor costs and declining productivity, though, were turning builders away from the world''s most universally available building material (superior in strength, durability, environmental impact, and performance) and toward materials--vinyl, aluminum, glass, and steel--that could be put up more quickly (and hence cheaply). Without an overhaul in the trade''s standard way of business, the teetering brick industry was at risk of fading into oblivion. It was true that good bricklayers were harder than ever to find, and that even the fastest one, when weighed against the march of progress, seemed slow, but the art of bricklaying, as ever, revealed a crucial metaphysical truth: Even our grandest aspirations require piling up innumerable small units in accordance with the law of gravity. In this way, the business opportunity that Scott Peters saw in the decline of bricklaying was a great deal more than that--but being stuck after placing just one brick left him no closer to addressing it.

Ironically enough, Scott had brought the present predicament on himself. More ironically still, Scott''s engineers had warned him. His chief engineer, in fact--a lively mustachioed tinkerer named Rocky Yarid--had spent a good portion of the previous five frantic months lambasting Scott for pursuing quick and dirty engineering solutions. "People don''t remember the quick," he''d said, "but they remember the dirty." Scott, though, had insisted on speed--partly due to his nature, partly due to the wisdom he''d picked up from a particular start-up book, and partly due to finances, most of which had their origins in the bank account of his gray-haired co-founder, Nate Podkaminer. With only so many funds, Scott had been pushing to innovate quickly--more quickly than Rocky or his five colleagues could handle. The six engineers did not lack experience. They''d designed and built houses, musical instruments, windshield wipers, multimillion-dollar X-ray-film factories, and the laser recorder with which Disney digitized Snow White .

Three had come from Kodak and, between them, had enough years on the job that they could recall not just when the company transitioned from pension plans to 401(k)s but when the buildings where they once worked were blown up live on TV. Two others, like Scott, had come from General Motors. In the factory where GM once made carburetors for Cadillacs and fuel injectors for Corvettes, GM had been designing fuel cells. Fuel cells were supposed to be the future. But twelve years and $140 million were not en.