Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke Skywalker Lightsaber - Authentic parts

replica movie prop

This lightsaber originally belonged to Anakin Skywalker and was passed on to his son Luke by Obi-Wan Kenobi. It is of course made from the most well known Star Wars prop part, a Graflex 3-cell camera flash. This antique flash mounted on the side of a Graflex large format camera commonly carried by press photographers in the 1940's. In the middle of the flash is the mounting clamp that attached to the camera. Slid into this clamp is a Light Emitting Diode display bubble type lens from a vintage calculator. These lenses are 2 inch long clear strips with a row of convex lenses referred to as "bubbles" to magnify the glowing red LED numbers. The lenses used on the lightsaber props had seven bubbles. Very few calculators have 7 bubble lenses so far only two models are known, the Exactra 19 and the Exactra 20. These were introduced by Texas Instruments in 1974 and are referred to as 6 digit displays (only six of the spaces are used for numbers, the leftmost is for modifiers like a negative sign). It's in my collection for over a decade now and I still have a special place for it in my collection.