When you launching a new technology, if you’re lucky, you can score funding for the initial research. And once you’re ready to take it to the masses, you can find investors who will back you up, but in between there’s a wide-gulf.

There’s a phrase people use for this time: the Valley of Death. In this period, you’ve got to spend lots of money— buy stuff, build stuff, hire people — but there isn’t necessarily a commensurate amount of money flowing in from sales. It’s the period where most startups die.

“You’re the proverbial trailblazer at the head of a trail, often-times others that follow behind you will be stepping over you as you’ve with your face in the mud and an arrow in your back,” explains Charlie Gay, who was head of manufacturing, research and engineering for ARCO solar, and who now works for the department of energy.

Charlie says solar got through the valley of death by starting with places that would be very, very expensive to run an electrical wire to. For instance, space. When Russia launched Sputnik, it only had a couple of batteries, and died after a few weeks in space. The first US satellite was equipped with solar panels and ran for years.

The technology then moved to Earth. It started with things like really really remote microwave repeater towers: those little dishes that send radio or telephone or television data through the air across line of sight, instead of using wires.

“And as the kids pulled themselves up on the gunnels of the boat, they all had ARCO solar t-shirts on. We had been there and done that.”

And we're talking really remote. As an example, Charlie heard a this story from an East Coast academic who took his family on an (oddly colonial, oddly voyeuristic) vacation in Papua New Guinea, staying with an isolated indigenous community. They traveled by jeep for a day, on horseback two or three days, and then took a rowboat upriver for 4 days. When the family arrived, a bunch of kids from this remote community swam out to their boat to when they arrived.

“And as the kids pulled themselves up on the gunnels of the boat, they all had ARCO solar t-shirts on,” Charlie says, “We had been there and done that.”

Solar's early markets included fog-horns and warning lights on oil rigs and protecting oil pipelines. Then they slowly started to power remote water-pumping on isolated ranches.

The real nut of this question, then, is this: did the solar industry get through the valley of death thanks to backwoods hippies in Northern California, kludging together their solar homes with bubble-gum, baling wire, and soldering irons?

David Katz certainly thinks so. “Because people were growing marijuana, they could afford solar panels that cost $12 a watt at the beginning,” he says, “So it made it grow. They were the ones who really enabled rooftop solar to get a foothold.”

But the consensus from the people with the 30,000 foot view, is that the Northern California home-power market was really just one that the manufacturers were selling to.

When I ask Art Ruden if ARCO would have been able to keep going if not for the hippies, he replies, “My guess is yes, it would have.”

Similarly Charlie Gay notes, “the majority of my career in industry up until perhaps the last five years, more than half my time was spent outside of America.” Though, he adds “you know, we all love to take poetic license and pride in our contribution and I don’t want to take anything away from an incredibly meaningful part of helping popularize solar in America.

What did we get from Northern California?

The most obvious thing that these folks did give the world was to figure out how to build a solar home. All of the solutions in the pages of Home-Power Magazine — charge controllers, AC inverters borrowed from wind turbines — were eventually taken up by the industry, and sold to off-grid homes nation-wide.

And the home-power market did eventually become substantial. By 1996, which seems to be the earliest date that the industry was keeping track of this information, one-third of solar panels installed in the US were on off-grid residential buildings. That business eventually began to stagnate once grid-tied solar panels began to explode in 2008.