I’m curious: what is the smallest metal can that’s in current use to package and ship some kind of good? (That is usually food such as vegetables e.g. canned corn, but I suppose non food items are occasionally sold in metal containers as well, like shaving cream.)
Smallest can mean volume held, it can mean a specific dimension (behold ladies and gentlemen, the World’s Shortest Can Of Soup) or I guess you might possibly have have some other definitions.
tip-tapping away by phone, but why would you care?
In the camping dept. or a BassPro shop you can get a very small metal can to hold matches. Remember the very small hinged tins Bayer aspirin used to come in?
I’m not sure a tin is quite precisely the same thing as a can, though. When I think of a can, I think of something hermetically sealed, which can only be opened by cutting it open or otherwise damaging it, not something resealable and which is tight but not perfectly airtight.
These are the smallest cans I have seen (of something sold commercially). I have seen tins as small as 1oz and supposedly there are also 0.5oz versions.
Back in the day, 35mm film came in screw top metal cans, I’d doubt they would hold 3/4 of an ounce. That were the same size as the plastic ones that replaced them, or close enough so as to make no difference.
The smallest tins I have recently seen are the automobile fuse assortments. Most are plastic today, but i have seen the ones with a metal body and a sliding plastic lid within the past few years.
The smallest can I’ve seen that required a can opener to open it contained a one milliliter vial of tetrodotoxin (TTX).
We used TTX in a neurophysiology lab. The vial was in a tiny can, which was inside a slightly larger can, which was inside a Tyvek envelope, which was in a well-taped box, which was in the shipping box.
Every time we received TTX, my boss would ask, “What come in small cans?” and tetrodotoxin was one of the answers. pedophiles was the other answer The times were different.
Some films at least must have been sold in metal canisters in Japan more recently–a friend in Tokyo mailed me something in one of them. The top doesn’t screw on, just fitted tightly into place. It is printed with the Agfa or Fujifilm (can’t remember which) logo and color scheme and doesn’t exactly match any I’m seeing on Google Images.