I've got a funny example. It's said that "Ytterbium (Yb) is sometimes alloyed with stainless steel to improve its mechanical properties, such as strength and durability." This claim has been repeated 1000 times. It's one of the best known "properties" of Yb. But there is no factual basis for it -- there are no commercial grades of stainless steel that incorporate Yb, there's no published research on Yb as an alloying constituent in stainless steel, and as far as I can tell it started as a throwaway line in a textbook that was probably just a mistake or misunderstanding...
As for Ytterbium - since there doesn't seem to be any stainless steel (SS) alloy for sale or even described / designated a code, it was possibly a one off project. Wikipedia [1] refers to it as a dopant when used in stainless steel alloys - but I think manufactures would still want to know if the SS metal they purchased was treated as such. But there's a lot of secret sauce BS in the manufacturing world.
Some things though are just in error. I used to late teens, refer to and spent much time reading an old but rather technical late 50s or 60s inorganic chemistry book - one of the things that stuck with me was where it mentioned Titanium would decompose boiling water into hydrogen and oxygen ... when I finally got my hands on some pure Titanium I found out it wasn't going to do that like I expected.
TillE•5mo ago
I find myself intermittently fascinated with the origin and spread of certain ideas, which can often be hard to track. It's probably a bit simpler when it's a very specifically wrong idea.