To be completely accurate only one of these three men actually packages and sells percieved happiness. Disney. His contributions on society far outweigh anyone else mentioned in here.
That's where I was going with the value of art above tech. Art gives its audience a direct experience of an entire universe constructed purely of the values the artist chooses to deem important enough to include in their work. Before Disney, there had never been art as accessible (who couldn't afford to go to the movies in 1925? and who was too young to understand a Disney feature?), all-encompassing (animated, full-color, musical cinema?), and life-affirming (where in the early Disney corpus does joy not triumph over evil?).
The 19th century at it's most optimistic still had an element of tragedy to it. The best art of the 18th century was inaccessible to most of the population. The 17th century was only just discovering how to elevate the arts into formidible craft. Before that were a handful of prodigies either selling for the private leisure of the extremely wealthy or were slaves to the Church, and even the best of them were heroic loners in a sea of misery. (Forget anything before Da Vinci, and life in the rest of the world outside of Europe, before and after was essentially primitive; nasty, poor, brutish and short.)
Disney packaged the uniquely American sense of life in a way that defied all doubt. It was simple, spectacular, pure, and it made happy endings seem like the most natural thing in the world. While Europe was decaying back into Medieval horror and existential angst, America was exploding the primitive lie that poverty, war, disease and death were all that people could look forward to.
Disney films packaged and shipped that view of the universe, a perspective without which none of America's achievements (or the rest of the world's, for that matter) would have been possible.
Yeh, there's nothing at all wrong with cultural optimism, though as an export it can be a two-sided coin. It becomes part of a cultural narrative that some embrace to varying degrees and some violently oppose. It's in this respect that Ford's model-T and Jobs' i-YouNameIt trump Disney's animation for positive global impact IMO. In terms of their global embrace they were innovators who are seen, universally, as being free of any cultural agenda.
I think the difference is that regardless of culture, those objects are still useful. The distilled essence of a culture like America's is not useful to those who want no part of that system of values. The thing is, the tech doesn't happen where the opposite type of culture prevails.
I can't think of a culture on Earth as diametrically opposed to ours as the culture of the Middle East. If you can show me how a microprocessor could happen in the midst of that---let alone something as comparatively crude as an internal combustion engine---I'll ____ you one gold brick, every day for the rest of my life. I'll even pay shipping.
Innovation is not culturally neutral.
