Murfey's final patents of 1870 brought her yearly total to fifteen patents plus one reissue — an extraordinary output for any inventor of the era.
On December 27, 1870, Eliza Murfey received her final patents of the calendar year: US 110,582, 110,583, and 110,584, continuing her series of bearing-material innovations for railroad car axles. With this grant, she closed out 1870 having received a documented fifteen patents plus one reissue (RE4,210) within a single twelve-month period — an extraordinary rate of invention rarely matched by any patentee, male or female, in this period.
This concentrated burst of patenting activity in 1870 is often cited as evidence of Murfey's position among the most prolific American women inventors of the nineteenth century. Her patents that year collectively covered packing materials, journal boxes, fibrous composites, and anti-hot-box lubrication systems — a coherent and expanding body of intellectual property centered on railroad axle-bearing safety.
The scale of this output suggests Murfey was operating with the deliberate strategy of a professional inventor-entrepreneur, likely working closely with patent attorneys and industrial partners such as the Manhattan Packing Manufacturing Company to rapidly protect and commercialize her innovations. Her achievement stands as a landmark in the history of women's participation in American industrial and mechanical invention, at a time when women were only beginning to be recognized as legitimate holders of technical patents by the U.S. Patent Office.