Thomas Jefferson loved window blinds so much that he put them in his will to be given to his loved ones. Blinds haven’t always functioned the way they do now, and it’s hard to imagine a world without blinds keeping unwanted light out of our homes.

In the past, window blinds were made out of bamboo by the Chinese and reeds strung together by the early Egyptians. Between 1100 and 1500 A.D., Venice merchants saw a window covering in Persia and took the idea home with them. There, they began to make Venetian blinds.

In 1769, Edward Bevan, an Englishman, received the first patent for Venetian blinds. His improvement was to make controlled wooden slats that could be maneuvered up or down depending on the amount of light desired. John Hampson, a man from New Orleans, improved on Bevan’s invention in 1841 by enabling the horizontal slats to move individually, so light could be altered without raising the entire blinds up or down.

Blinds today come in multitudes of shapes, sizes, materials, and styles—you can even get blinds that don’t have any strings and can be raised or lowered by holding the bottom of the blinds.

Window blinds serve a much needed function, but they have also been historically used to set a tone or mood in classical paintings, as well as black and white movies where the shadow falls across the blinds.