For the individuals themselves possibly, not for the business model, because the high risk business model of today did not exist. In your own examples Both Ford and Edison worked on their inventions as a side hustle in addition to their regular jobs. They were not professional entrepreneurs when they worked on original inventions.
In fact this is almost necessarily true for any paradigm changing invention, it happens outside the status quo. As Schumpeter pointed out, as soon as someone is drawn into a formal mode of invention they're just replicating, not jumping ahead of what came before. Every truly important invention is entirely original almost by definition.
The defining feature of entrepreneurship today is that it is like a Keynesian beauty contest. You check a few boxes and we give X dollars for Y shares and we show you "how to do" entrepreneurship.
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/model-t
I would argue that businesses that were founded before bankruptcy law in 1898 were far more risky than modern ventures. In addition, there were no social safety nets to pick you back up if ended up impoverished in the 1890s. But that's quite a tangent from the core overarching theme of the modern era, in which entrepreneurial economies have consistently beat out command and control economies.
The main difference between today and 100 years ago, is now we have an abundance of capital. It was much, much harder to get capital back then. Even loans for houses were hard to come by.