Re: The answer is no...
Well that's kind of the point: Henry Ford went in for an assembly-line approach. When you say he only famous because he put his name on his cars, you are sidestepping the whole *reason* his cars became famous in the first place. He didn't invent assembly lines or internal combustion engines, but he put his resources behind a combination of the two.
Or: Is a man who invents cars a better engineer than the man who invents machines to make cars? It's clearly a nonsense question.
Sometimes a person becomes associated with a technology because they were in the right place at the right time, with whatever motivation and whatever resources (brainpower, reputation, money) they happened to possess.
Heck, Aldous Huxley adopted Ford's name as a signpost in a fork of human history in Brave New World. The novel Catch-22 was a warning about how the manufacturing techniques in WW-2, echoing Dwight D Esienhower's Farewell Speech, had continued into peacetime. Heller's mate Kurt Vonnegut was a straight-up journalist until his editor mistook his true-to-life reportage of a post-war factory as science fiction.
There is technology, and then the is use that technology is put to. Would the name Oppenhiemer be as well known had his bosses not decided to finace the Manhatten Project?
Maybe individuals are important, maybe not - I don't know - though the telephone is held up as an example of very similar invention patents being filed on the same day by different people on different continents.
If inventor X had been 'run over by a bus' as a child, would inventor Y have invented the same thing within a year?
If a Salesman or Military Commander had not promoted invention A, would others have done sooner or later?
tl,dr If you are interested in technology, study the scientists and inventors. If you are interested about how technology impacts upon people's lives, study people, scientists, inventors, manufacturers, salesmen, generals, presidents, etc
Biting the hand that feeds IT
