If you bought a classic car today, you might be surprised to find a small metal button on the floor next to the gas and brake pedals. This is the headlight dimmer switch, and it’s wired directly into the headlights to switch between the high and low beams. It’s an oddity now, but for much of the 20th century, this foot dimmer was the standard in American automobiles.

Floor buttons were common in the 1920s because they were cheap to make and easy to install. (They corroded pretty easily since they were exposed to anything that got tracked into the car, but they were also pretty simple to fix, even for nonmechanics.) While some cars had special low beams activated on the steering column as early as the 1950s, if you were driving a stick shift, having both your hands free was especially handy, so the foot control was preferred for anything that required adjusting while driving.

The design began to change during the oil crisis of the 1970s, when gas prices spiked and drivers became concerned with fuel economy. This contributed to the rise of front-wheel drive and more compact cars, which consolidated controls at the front of the vehicle. European cars already had high beam controls on the steering column, so it was a logical location switch. Ford’s Econoline van and F-150 truck were the last two vehicles to use foot-operated lights, with the feature lasting into the 1990s.