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.
