I’m not sure who first came up with the term “spam can” to designate a basic, fixed-tricycle-gear, aluminum airplane. Spam itself originated in the late 1930s, and Hormel, the manufacturer of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous pork shoulder/ham product, actually started calling it “Spam” to make it sound jazzier. It needn’t have bothered.
One of the defining characteristics of Spam, of course, aside from its less-than-mouth-watering taste, was its packaging. It was vacuum-packed in cans of aluminum so thin that the top could simply be peeled away. Which is undoubtedly the link. A spam can, whether a disposable ammunition box (Chrysler produced a bunch of ammo containers known as “spam cans” during World War II) or an inexpensive aluminum aircraft, came to mean any cheap, somewhat flimsy and mass-produced aluminum container.
