In late 2005, Amazon (AMZN) launched a website without fanfare with a strange name and an even stranger pitch. Jeff Bezos called it “Mechanical Turk,” after an 18th-century chess-playing machine that ...

For about 85 years spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a strange automaton called the Mechanical Turk toured across Europe and America, drawing entranced crowds wherever it went. The ...

For more than two decades, Amazon.com Inc.’s Mechanical Turk offered a similar illusion to its namesake. The 18th century chess-playing “machine” was actually a contraption controlled by a human ...