In the week since he announced he was stepping down as Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs has been accorded the kind of demigod status that Americans bestow on the handful of their countrymen who invent, manufacture and market the goods that change their lives for the better. Jobs has been compared to any number of iconic American innovators, but most tellingly to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

“Like Edison,” wrote the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta , Jobs “accomplished his imaginative feats without the crutch of survey results,” because, like Edison, he was imagining products unlike any that had previously existed. “Like Ford,” wrote the New York Times’s Joe Nocera , who “built the first automobile the middle class could afford,” Jobs brought out a line of inventions that Americans could buy even as their incomes flat-lined.

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