Trash Can: Who Invented It?

A French man Monsieur Eugène Poubelle (poubelle = 'trash can' in French), of course!

Wikipedia recounts and confirms what our French teachers told us:

Becoming préfet of the Seine was significant [for Poubelle, 1831-1907] because more local administration, at town halls, had been largely removed in Paris. On 7 March 1884 Poubelle decreed that owners of buildings must provide those who lived there with three covered containers of 40 to 120 litres to hold household refuse. It was to be sorted into perishable items, paper and cloth, crockery and shells. 

The population of Paris, close to two millions, needed a system to empty the containers regularly. Parisians began to name their boxes after Poubelle, a habit encouraged by the newspaper Le Monde, which called them Boîtes Poubelle. But the boxes met resistance, owners of buildings resenting the cost of providing and supervising the bins and traditional rag-and-bone men, the chiffoniers, seeing a threat to their living. The boxes deteriorated but the principles of what Poubelle established survived. But not until the end of the Second World War did dustbins and their collection by municipalities become common. By then poubelle as a noun had been established by a supplement of the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du 19ème Siècle in 1890.