Although the term appears to have been coined at the start of the 1950s , mushroom clouds generated by explosions were being described centuries before the atomic era . A contemporary aquatint by an unknown artist of the 1782 Franco-Spanish attack on Gibraltar shows one of the attacking force 's floating batteries exploding with a mushroom cloud , after the British defenders set it ablaze by firing heated shot . The 1917 Halifax Explosion produced one . '' The Times '' published a report on 1 October 1937 of a Japanese attack on Shanghai in China which generated " a great mushroom of smoke " . During World War II , descriptions of mushroom clouds were relatively common
Halifax Explosion
Halifax Explosion
Mushroom cloud