Same in Germany. I never considered magnet fishing growing up there and now I remember why: it was super common for WW2 explosives to be found that didn't explode on impact but had corroded over time.
I used to collect magnetic ore from sand using magnets in childhood. If magnets were available in history, then a certain tribe didnt have to pimp their women to obtain iron nails from sailors who ripped them from the very ship they were supposed to maintain, or modern western countries didnt have to burn down barns to recover nails.
When I did riversurfung in European rivers and canals we always had a cleanup day at the begin of the season, and we pulled out a lot of gear. Bicycles, chairs, various stuff, but never a laptop, watch or phone.
We jumped into it and dived. Magnets are only for tiny things. Only the big things block the way and are dangerous.
Aren't objects at the bottom of a river at great risk of permanent damage? I'd imagine metal artifacts are hoping for a magnet fisherman to find them before they're gone for good.
Did you miss the part where basically nobody would give their child a box full of non-magnetic BBs anyway? Even if you had no clue magnets were dangerous, if you thought they were the safety equivalent of stainless steel BBs, you wouldn't give a toddler a box of them.
I can't believe they waited this long. I'd be surprised if a lot of adults haven't swallowed these, too. Everybody knows that BBs and pennies pass easily, so why wouldn't you think that about magnets? It isn't like the warnings are printed on every ball, and there's nothing intuitive about their danger.
Tiny, strong BB magnets can have no place in a house that ever has kids in it. It's not safe to have them in or on daddy's desk, or anywhere else. Maybe in the gun safe.
Also, I always assumed that the Fuller estate got a cut of this. Pretty rotten all around.
edit: swallowing small strong magnets is a fairly unique, well known, and long standing danger. When I was a kid, a lot of plastic items were made magnetic by gluing in tiny (maybe 3/4 cm diameter) disks. After a lot of resectioning of the necrotic bowels of a lot of children, and a lot of death amongst both children and animals, this ended. Good riddance. It's safer to let your kid play with a bag of broken glass.
I honestly had no idea this was even an issue. I purchased some outrageously strong magnets from Lee Valley for some wood working projects.
You don't want to get them stuck between your fingers, but besides keeping them away from visa cards and rotating hard drives, I didn't think much more about the potential dangers. Thank goodness the negligence of my government didn't cause me all manner of danger (kidding).
The point of the magnet is that even if you don't find the nuke you find the hordes of AR-15s people have lost in "tragic boating accidents" over the years. If you go out fishing for bluefin it's better to come back with a cooler full of stripers than an empty cooler, metaphorically speaking.
I lived in a rural area growing up and it was not uncommon to come across the cow magnets in fields, sides-of-road, and so on. I think I still have a couple of them stowed away somewhere in my pack-ratty shelves. I recall that they were not very strong magnets.
I've played around with some pretty bad ass magnets during the time that I was building wind turbines and one of the more interesting effects was that if you dropped one near anything made of steel you were actually in danger of getting shrapnel embedded in your body.
They move so fast it is scary, sometimes they explode on impact. This makes you pretty nervous about dropping them.
Then, one day one got dropped over a chunk of solid aluminum. It floated gently to the metal landing with a soft 'click'. Besides the initial surprise (I realized the eddy currents induced a magnet field of opposing polarity in the aluminum) what struck me most was the force of that opposing magnet. If you tried to force the magnet close to the aluminum at speed it would resist so strongly that you never managed to smash it into it with any kind of effectiveness. Always just that soft 'click'.
I still have a bunch of 3"x2"x1" neos waiting for some project, and whenever someone visits that's interested in technology I show them what those things can do, if you have tried to pry one of those from a chunk of solid steel (or if you're unlucky, another magnet) you know what I mean when I say I have a lot of respect for those little golden blocks.
One time when I was very young, I was already such a tech-nerd that I chose to attack my father with a magnet, intended to damage his wristwatch.
I was calmly informed that he'd already selected a watch that was immune to magnetic fields. But of course that was a real danger to old-fashioned movements which had many ferrous parts that relied on not sticking together.
I never lived it down. Some of our childish rebellions are ridiculous in retrospect!
Interestingly enough, when I lived in Brussels people used magnets to fish stuff out of the canals on a regular basis :-) lots of "interesting" things are attracted to magnets.
That they could snag an iPhone was pretty amazing. I would be inclined to fish for other phones, perhaps the folks who live on canal boats could 'trawl' a magnet line :-) (It's Friday, okay?)
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