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The cites found by Google nGram Viewer for "whippersnapper show Works in Prose and Verse, Serious, Moral, and Comical, Volume 3 in 1708,

A grave old Gentleman, offended at this rude and frothy Discourse, gave his whiskers a twirl, and thus reprimanded our fawcy[sic] Whippersnapper: Know Boys, cries he to him in angry tone, know Sirrah, that every Age stands upon the same level as to the duration oh Life; a Man of Fourscore is young enough to live abd an Infant but of Four Days birth is old enough to die. I apprehend your meaning, old Gentlemen, says our young Prig to him, well enough; You are young enough to live today and old enough to die to morrow.

(am I alone in interpreting this as a threat to the whippersnapper?) and then nothing else until 1770 with Midas: An English Burletta. As it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal.  Midas rhymes the word, so he must have figured it common enough to use:

Folly now to be compassionate
Is such a little dapper
Pert, saucy whippersnapper,
Sileno's undertrapper

It seems an awful long time for a word to go "underground" but there weren't as many books published in te 18th century, many would no longer exist, it's a rather impertinent word for editors to tolerate, there being fewer impertinent books.  In the UK,  the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers from 1557 to 1710 had a monopoly on publishing, and Thomas Paine chafed under their restrictions which were still being upheld in the 1752s and 1760s as a manner of "that's how we've always done it."

Merriam-Webster says it's an alteration of snippersnapper, but it doesn't say why.  Don't things normally go *towards* sing-song with the same initial letters?  Looks like this stream is flowing uphill.

The word snippersnapper doesn't show up on the Google ngram viewer until The Dramatic Works of John Ford in 1827, 119 years after whippersnapper was first seen.  I don't question but that the two words are father-and-son, but I think M-W has it backward.  This John Ford was born in Devon and was a playwright.  The one we know of from Stagecoach and 144 other films he directed (including a 1942 short called Sex Hygiene) was born "John Martin Feeney" in Maine and changed his name ifor Hollywood).

Random House says:

1665-75; probably blend of earlier whipster and snippersnapper, similar in sense; seewhip, snap, -er

Interestingly enough, they don't have an entry for whipster.  Some other dictionaries say it's a synonym of whippersnapper, with no details on word origin.  A look at arly cites in nGram suggests Shakespeare may have coined that word. He apparently used the word (possibly in Othello, in 1630, which predates everything else). but I haven't been able to find it in context.  A page of Shakespearean insults defines it as "wretch, degenerate, good-for-nothing", which suggests a whipster is good only for giving your whip a target.  Maybe someone familiar with Shakespeare (Glen is usually great at this!) can provide a little context.

Quipster rhymes with whipster, and like the whippersnapper, is annoyingly impertinent.  Random House just says (quip+ster), Collins says nothing, and M-W provides 1876 as a first known use. Actually, The Musical World, Volume 15, published in 1841 used the term.

All of which really doesn't answer where did the word whippersnapper come from?  All I've found out for my pains is that there's a lot of bad lexicography out there.  (God, I'd hate to be a lexicographer today, getting blamed for what was reasonably good work when it was done, but now remaining as a time bomb, just waiting for some guy with too much time on his hands, someone like me, to make it look like they are incompetent because there is suddenly a new tool out there, and they haven't had time to update decades of work!)

In any case, backed with my lack of training and my casual research, I have come to the conclusion that "whip" has less to do with it than "wit" does.  That original cite  A whippersnapper is one who, to (mis?)quote Mae West, "he thinks he's a wit, and he's half right". The whippersnapper has a snappy comment for everything, and while he cracks these quips as one might snap a whip, the fact that he's so often wrong, because of being wet behind the ears, whippersnapper is what he's called instead of witsnapper, as an addition layer of insult.

Whew!  I'd be glad for someone to tell me I'm wrong about all this, because trying to piece together this research has me a little dizzy.