Why are cans called cans?

[Illuminatio]

Anyone know the answer to this? One theory is that they are often made by CANford Audio (under the Tecpro brand) but old telephones of the two-piece sort (one bit held to the mouth and one to the ear) were also called cans. I've always assumed the analogy is with two tin cans and a length of string, but does anyone have a definitive etymology?

[boatman]

Canford didn't exist when headphones started to be called cans. It started in the BBC in the 1930s probably because headphones in those days looked like this:

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Brandes_Superior_Matched_Tone_c._1919-21.jpg

[bigclive]

Those are very "steampunk" looking these days.

[kerry davies]

I seem to remember it came from the trenches slang of men who had never seen a wired telephone before and equated the miles of wires and tin earpieces with "cans'n'string" from childhood. Could be wrong. Not quite that old.

 

I know my great uncle had "cans" as earpieces for the crystal radios he had left over from the 1920's.

[alistermorton]

Canford didn't exist when headphones started to be called cans. It started in the BBC in the 1930s probably because headphones in those days looked like this:

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Brandes_Superior_Matched_Tone_c._1919-21.jpg

 

Ah - that's where I left them.

 

I had a pair presactly like those when I was a lad.

[rossmck]

I've heard some people (particularly BBC and ex-BBC) refer to any form of headphone as "cans" ... strangely the same people would almost always call what we call cans "talkback"

[GaryNattrass]

I think it goes all the way back to two tin cans and a piece of string: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_can_telephone

[Bobbsy]

Having just made a tin cans and string toy for our 9 year old, I have the same suspicion. Before the days of cheap walkie talkies and so on, "cans" were the only communication toy available to children. When I was about 10 we had a network of strings and cans involving our back porch, a tree house, a convenient branch in another tree and the roof of our garage. The person on the back porch was the "master station" relaying messages as needed.