The manufacture of insulating materials employed more than 60,000 people in Germany alone in the 1920s, when certain applied physicists hoped to develop a science of high-voltage insulators, briefly signaling the “dawn of industrio-physics.” Their hopes turned out to be premature. No immediate predecessor to materials science emerged in this “declared borderland” where physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering overlapped, and these failures subsequently vanished from narratives of modern physics, though some of the protagonists were well versed in atomic theory. But this was more than a matter of brute empirical intractability in the early days of the quantum theory of solids. This episode, properly situated in the industrial research laboratory, can tell us much about the shifting meaning of “applied science” between the wars—and what patent lawyers have to teach us historians about the “artisan, handwork character of science.”