Could be that it was a hard job, but there are a lot of hard jobs. Doing a hard job doesn’t mean that you’ve accomplished some sort of major achievement.
That might be true, but that doesn’t mean that all those things were really needed to be astronauts. Just that they provided some marginal advantage, so if the program had a choice of people with or without these skills they would take the ones with them.
You could also do it with saying that, and I’m choosing Option B. Though I should qualify that “nothing special at all” is a relative term - see below.
That actually ties in to my point.
because if you saw everything else these guys did it would be impressive when compared to your random guy in the street. And no doubt these guys were a cut above - or several cuts above - your random guy in the street. I’m not denying that. But these guys are not being accorded hero status based on the types of accomplishments that you are praising here. They were accorded hero status based on the notion that their space missions in particular were unique accomplishments. And this is where I disagree. Their space missons in particular were big accomplishments by other people. These people were not the true heroes of these missions. So where does that leave them? It leaves them as people who had college degrees, were succesfull pilots and in good physical and mental condition, and willing to brave a potentially dangerous mission. Pretty good, but not anything uniquely great.
But the public dosn’t see things that way, I understand. The public also gives full credit to singers for great songs that were composed by others, and so on. So it goes.
It’s not like Shepard’s flight wasn’t publicized at the time it happened. If people remember Glenn’s flight more years later it’s due to things like whose personality stuck in their mind.
Getting back to the OP, I was going to comment that what Edison really invented first was the whole, money making, electrical system with generation, distribution, and billing. However a little research shows Charles Brush had such an operation going in numerous locations several years before Edison. And, per Wikipedia;
“The San Francisco system was the first case of a utility selling electricity from a central plant to multiple customers via transmission lines.[”
Still, Edison often gets credit for inventing the system.
Thomas Edison is best thought of as the Henry Ford of Industrial R&D and electricity in general. That’s where it should start and stop, and that’s actually both more important and probably less “interesting” to most people than “inventor of the phonograph, potentially the light bulb and etc etc.”
Edison invented the standard (screw) socket for electric bulbs, many switch designs (some in use to this day), and the first practical underground electric cables (a copper conductor in an iron pipe, insulated with asphalt). He also invented the first metering device for charging customers for their power use, and the first practical electric generators. Yes, he was dead wrong about AC, but he did invent all of the stuff that made electric power to the home feasible. So even though his DC power system was a dead end, he did pioneer most of what made widespread electrification possible.