I’m not sure, but I think I’ve read that the word ‘can’, evolved from the word canister. Canister was a munition where many musket balls were packed in a tin container and fired from a cannon. When they started using ‘cans’ to contain ‘canned food’ the tin food containers resembled the munition.
Personally, I’m very hesitant to consider violence as a solution to any problem, but war certainly creates an incentive to come up with new technologies. As much as I mistrust the military industrial complex we sure get a lot of cool stuff from it. Hmmm… Would I give up metallurgy if, in turn, North Korea, the cold war, and Nazi Germany never existed?