Precisely where or when the very first Venetian blinds appeared has long been a point of some conjecture. Slatted blinds made from various timbers were popular throughout northern Italy in the mid to late- 1700s; these consisted of slats held together by strips of fabric rather than corded cloth, and the angle of the slats could be adjusted with the use of a tilting device, not unlike what is in use today. When freed Venetian slaves took Venetian blinds to France in the 1790s, the window coverings soon became known to the French as les Persiennes (the Persians).
In fact, by the 1700s Italy had already enjoyed a long association with the Venetian blind. Archeologists have uncovered slatted window coverings amid the ruins of Pompeii, with the individual slats being fashioned from marble. Farther to the east, the earliest window coverings unearthed in modern Iran (previously known as Persia) have been dated to 4000 B.C.E.; these were made from clay tiles. To the south, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, shutters made from an amalgam of alabaster and marble have been found among ruins attributed to the ancient Minoan civilization (2600-1100 B.C.E.).
In England, Venetian blinds were patented by Edward Beran in London on December 11, 1769. A century later they became highly popular with the Victorians as an alternative to curtains, which had become heavy, cumbersome, and unfashionable.
The modern method of adjusting the angle of the slats while keeping them synchronized and parallel was invented in 1841 by John Hampson of New Orleans, Louisiana. Blinds made from wood continued to remain popular until the development by Joe Hunter and Henry Sonnenberg of the 2-inch (50 mm) aluminum slat inth-emid-1940s.
