A second U.S. patent was issued to Black American inventor Thomas Elkins for a new article of chamber furniture which he designated a "Chamber Commode" (No. 122,518). It provides a combination of "a bureau, mirror, book-rack, washstand, table, easy-chair, and earth-closet or chamber-stool," which might otherwise be constructed as several separate articles. Previously, a patent had been issued to Elkins on 22 Feb 1870 for a "Dining, Ironing Table and Quilting Frame Combined" (No. 100,020). Another patent was subsequently issued on 11 Apr 1879 for a "Refrigerating Apparatus" for "food or corpses," which provides a convenient container and method of chilling using the evaporation of water. (No. 221,222).

George Stibitz's Complex Number Calculator was functional. He was a research mathematician at Bell Laboratories, who worked on its construction from Apr 1939, assisted by Samuel Williams. Later known as Bell Labs Model I Relay Computer, it used telephone relays and coded decimal numbers as groups of four binary digits (bits) each. It has been called the first electromechanical computer for routine use. A demonstration of its ability in remote computing was given on 11 Sep 1940, when messages were exchanged by phone lines between teletypewriter operators. Calculations suggested by attendees of the American Mathematical Society's meeting at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire were communicated to an attendant at the keyboard of Stibitz's calculator in New York.