The names of the inventors of the light bulb and the telephone come to mind very easily - Edison and Bell.

Other world-shaking inventions have inventors a little more obscure - far too many people don't know that Nikola Tesla invented alternating current, without which you wouldn't have power in your home - and some are downright forgotten.

Partly this is because we don't think of some things as inventions.

Quick, name the inventor of the modern men's suit.

Don't know? Maybe it didn't have precisely one inventor, but a single man changed the course of men's fashion, ushering in the birth of everything from the tuxedo to the power suit.

George Bryan "Beau" Brummell was born in 1778 in England, the grandson of a shopkeeper, the son of a private secretary to a wealthy lord. Although he wasn't noble himself - something that still mattered a great deal then - he grew up around the nobility, and in his teens met and befriended the Prince of Wales, the future Prince Regent.

In the decades before Brummell was born, men's and women's fashion in western Europe was dominated by excess. The nobility wore ruffled shirts exploding with lace at the cuffs, along with coats trimmed in gold braid or fur. The colours were anything but subdued, with pink, scarlet, mustard yellow, and green common. Everything was typically topped with a powdered wig, or powdered white hair.

The more formal the occasion, the more elaborate the costuming became. A major court event could resemble a collision between New Orleans Mardi Gras, Halloween, and a Gay Pride Parade.

Brummell, a witty, self-centred man, popularized a new style of dress. First, he all but killed off the combination of breeches and stockings, substituting trousers. He did away with lace cuffs and frilly collars, preferring an elaborate cravat, the forerunner of the necktie. And he ditched bright colours, preferring subdued tones. Brummell's clothing looks odd by modern standards, but it's still clearly the ancestor of a suit.

This is not to say that Brummell was less concerned with his clothes. In fact, he was a legend in his own time for the elaborate care he took with every aspect of his appearance.

He made wild claims: that he took several hours to dress and style his hair, that he used champagne to polish his boots, that he had every piece of clothing made by a different, specialized tailor.

Some of his claims were probably true. Beau Brummell came onto the social scene at the same time that the word dandy appeared in slang, and he exemplified that word for almost 20 years.

His fall was hard. Calling the Prince Regent fat in public was a part of it (hey, it was true), but it was mainly debt that brought Brummell low. In 1816, he fled to France, where he lived cheaply (though still well dressed) and avoided his many creditors. In trying to live like the nobility, he had burned through a sizeable fortune in a little more than two decades.

It was the people who came up in Brummell's wake who took up his fashions. His view that the cut of a suit should be more important than ostentatious ornaments must have seemed perfect for the rising industrial middle classes. Factory owners, managers, bureaucrats, and engineers bought suits in plain shades that didn't compete with the grandeur of the 18th century.

By the time of Brummell's death, the power of aristocrats was slipping away. The new powerful classes wore the uniform created by the grandson of a shopkeeper who had aspired to be a lord of fashion.

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