Element #50 is Tin.
Tin is a silvery metal, first discovered in antiquity when it was used as an additive to harden copper to make bronze (Bronze Age: ca. 3500-1200 BC). Its chemical symbol, Sn, comes from Stannum, the Latin name for tin.
One of tin’s most useful properties is that it resists corrosion, leading to its use in coating steel cans for food preservation. In 1810, Pierre Durand patented a method for preserving food in metal cans. (Surprisingly, the can opener wasn’t invented until about 30 years later.) Originally, canned foods were used only by the military and on long journeys of exploration, but later in the century, as the urban population swelled, canned foods had become cheap enough to be available to the masses who had little access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
With its abundance of fruit orchards and vegetable farms, San Jose was an early center of food canning in California. The San Jose Fruit Packing Company first opened at the corner of Julian and North Fifth St. in San Jose in 1890 and a few years later, opened a larger plant complex on Auzerais St, which was the largest cannery in the world in the 1890s. This company was one of the founding members of the California Fruit Canners Association, which adopted the name Del Monte for its premium brand. The Del Monte plant on Auzerais St. became known as Plant #3 and operated until its closure in 1999.
This cache is located near the base of the most obvious remaining piece of that cannery. This section of the Los Gatos Creek Trail is the latest stretch to become publicly accessible, now that the housing construction has finished.
The cache is a magnetic nano-cache.