Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest weapons classifiable as swords date to around 3300 BC and were found at Arslantepe in Turkey. They were made from arsenical bronze, about 60 centimetres long, and some were inlaid with silver. The first swords unambiguous enough to be classified without dispute are those from Minoan Crete, dated to around 1700 BC, which reached more than 100 centimetres in length.
A thrusting sword has a straighter blade with a pointed tip designed to impale targets and inflict deep stab wounds, as with the rapier and smallsword. A slashing sword is more likely to be curved with a sharpened cutting edge on one or both sides of the blade, built more heavily for use against multiple opponents, often from horseback, as with the sabre and cutlass. Many swords are designed for both purposes.
The Naue II, also known as Griffzungenschwert and first described by Julius Naue, appeared around the 13th century BC in Northern Italy and remained in use for roughly seven centuries, surviving the shift from bronze to iron without changing its basic design. Robert Drews linked its spread from Southern Europe into the Mediterranean with the Bronze Age collapse. Most specimens fall in the 60 to 70 centimetre range.
Pier Gerlofs Donia, a Frisian warrior, is associated with a zweihänder measuring 2.13 metres in length. The zweihänder was used by elite German and Swiss mercenaries called doppelsöldners in the 16th century, and its extreme blade length was designed specifically for pushing aside enemy polearms.
Lapu-Lapu, the king of Mactan, led the warriors who defeated the Spanish forces and killed Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan at the Battle of Mactan on the 27th of April 1521. Traditional large swords called kampilans and panabas were used by Filipino fighters in combat during this period.
British Army officers were still required to have their swords sharpened at mobilization in August 1914, but the weapon was abandoned within weeks due to its high visibility and limited practical use. It was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that most remaining horse-mounted regiments across Europe and the Americas discarded the sword for all but ceremonial purposes. The last units of British heavy cavalry switched to armoured vehicles as late as 1938.