All of this is true, and you haven't even started getting into prototype hardware where a minor coding error could cause your hardware to literally catch fire. When you're playing with mechatronics, you often get into fun games of "was it mechanical, electrical or software that let the magic smoke out". :)
If you consider the various meaning of "smoke test" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing , I suspect you'll agree that the mechanical meaning is almost certainly older than the electrical or the software.
That's where you have some vessel that should be air-tight, and you blow some smoke into it to see if/where the smoke leaks. You could do that for plumbing, you could do that for musical instruments, you could do that for all sorts of things.
Maybe the electrical engineers came up with the term "smoke testing" all own their own, but I think it's a lot likelier that they heard it from some plumbers or something, liked it, and then it gained _additional_ cachet from the association with smoke-means-failure.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine EEs coming up with "smoke test" independently. I've never heard it actually used in the mechanical sense (although I think I was aware of the term) but I've heard many people talk about magic smoke and electrical smoke tests. And the usage isn't quite congruent - an electrical smoke test (as I understand the term, anyway) is very specifically the act of applying full voltage to a freshly assembled and untested piece of equipment and being ready to shut off the power if anything starts to smoke (or less dramatically, seeing if any circuit breakers trip.)
Indeed, a smoke test will demonstrate the integrity or not of one's plumbing stack. An exterminator used on to determine that rats were getting into our house through a vent pipe that had been removed without the remainder being capped.
Comments
All of this is true, and you haven't even started getting into prototype hardware where a minor coding error could cause your hardware to literally catch fire. When you're playing with mechatronics, you often get into fun games of "was it mechanical, electrical or software that let the magic smoke out". :)
I heard the term “smoke test” came from the hardware expression “if there’s no smoke, it will probably work”
If you consider the various meaning of "smoke test" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing , I suspect you'll agree that the mechanical meaning is almost certainly older than the electrical or the software.
That's where you have some vessel that should be air-tight, and you blow some smoke into it to see if/where the smoke leaks. You could do that for plumbing, you could do that for musical instruments, you could do that for all sorts of things.
Maybe the electrical engineers came up with the term "smoke testing" all own their own, but I think it's a lot likelier that they heard it from some plumbers or something, liked it, and then it gained _additional_ cachet from the association with smoke-means-failure.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine EEs coming up with "smoke test" independently. I've never heard it actually used in the mechanical sense (although I think I was aware of the term) but I've heard many people talk about magic smoke and electrical smoke tests. And the usage isn't quite congruent - an electrical smoke test (as I understand the term, anyway) is very specifically the act of applying full voltage to a freshly assembled and untested piece of equipment and being ready to shut off the power if anything starts to smoke (or less dramatically, seeing if any circuit breakers trip.)
Indeed, a smoke test will demonstrate the integrity or not of one's plumbing stack. An exterminator used on to determine that rats were getting into our house through a vent pipe that had been removed without the remainder being capped.