We’re sure you don’t have to be told what a Laser Sword is, but for those completely uninitiated to the poppest of pop culture of the last 45 years, they appear, of course as the Lightsaber in the Star Wars franchise, and were unsurprisingly voted the most popular weapon in film history.

However, the idea of a laser sword wasn’t unique to the franchise, with unbridled energy swords first featuring in Edmond Hamilton’s “Kaldar: Word of Antares”, a popular science fiction story, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. The laser sword appears under different titles across the decade, notably as “rods of wrath” in Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Gather Darkness, and “force-blades” in the Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series from the 1950s.And as George Lucas was a self-admitted science fiction fan as a child, it’s not a stretch to imagine that these works could have served as inspiration.