Mr. Jobs, however, clearly learned from his experiences at NeXT about what not to do, such as driving away after short stints the talented people he had recruited. When he returned to Apple, he built an executive team that remained stable.

THE later careers of the two were more different than similar. Mr. Jobs was able to realize his product visions — again and again. Edison’s career was characterized by a pattern of introducing what today we would call a beta version of a product and then losing interest in it. Competitors would then swoop in and fully commercialize the idea — and profit the most from it.

Mr. Jobs was the far shrewder businessman, even if he never talked about wealth as a matter of personal interest. When Edison died, he left behind an estate valued at about $12 million, or about $180 million in today’s dollars. His friend Henry Ford had once joked that Edison was “the world’s greatest inventor and the world’s worst businessman.” Mr. Jobs was worth a commanding $6.5 billion.

Mr. Jobs was perhaps the most beloved billionaire the world has ever known. Richard Branson’s tribute captures the way people felt they could identify with Mr. Jobs’s life narrative: “So many people drew courage from Steve and related to his life story: adoptees, college dropouts, struggling entrepreneurs, ousted business leaders figuring out how to make a difference in the world, and people fighting debilitating illness. We have all been there in some way and can see a bit of ourselves in his personal and professional successes and struggles.”

By contrast, Edison became a victim of his own manufactured life narrative and the world’s adulation. Earlier, when Edison introduced the spring-driven phonograph in 1878, a reporter coined a nickname for him: “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” He liked — too much — playing the Wizard. He was ever ready to pontificate on any subject under the sun. Educational reform. National defense spending. The fatal effects of clothing that “pinches” the body. The relationship of diet to national destiny (“The rice-eating nations never progress...”). Much of it was ephemera or idiocy, best forgotten.

Steve Jobs did not waste his time or ours with similar flotsam. A rare time that he publicly stepped out of the role of chief executive and shared personal thoughts was when he delivered the commencement address at Stanford in June 2005. It was a moving meditation on his life and his — and our — mortality. It was a talk for the ages.

Early in Mr. Jobs’s career, journalists were wary of stepping within range of his “reality distortion field,” his perceived ability as a showman to make products seem better than they actually were. But it was Mr. Jobs’s personal reality in his later years, making the most of a life that both he and we knew would be cruelly cut short, that proved most influential in the end.

The public tributes to Edison in 1931 and those to Mr. Jobs 80 years later were similar, but only superficially. With Edison, the public thought of the Wizard, an outsize persona, through which it was impossible to see an actual person. But with Mr. Jobs, the tributes were to a fellow mortal, exactly our own height, just as vulnerable as we all are to the random strike of a life-ending catastrophe.