What happens inside the brain that prompts a burst of creativity in the worst of times?  Think about all the clever ways ways prison inmates have busted free.  If only they had applied those smarts while in school they might not have ended up in prison in the first place, but it took desperate times to meet with equal force some great invention in problem-solving.  I believe this Great Recession will go down in history as the cradle of new products and ideas to last this century and beyond.

We only have to go back to the Great Depression of 1929 to 1941 to see what happens when unemployment, bread lines and the loss of everything spawns invention.  Here are some of the items still in use today that were created by entrepreneurs back then:

1930:  Ford Motor Company debuts the first car radio.  Who can imagine a long car ride today without music to help pass the time?

1930: You may not be familiar with the name “King Cullen”, but it was the first supermarket and it opened in Queens. Today supermarkets rule.

1931: Tampax are developed by Dr. Earle Cleveland Hass, a Colorado physician who based his new invention on the cotton plugs he used in surgery.  No woman need stay out of the pool since.

1935: Unemployed engineer Charles Darrow imagines a life of wealth and real estate and invents the best-selling board game of all time: Monopoly.

1934: J.F. Cantrell of Texas purchased four washing machines and placed them in a single building to open the nation’s first “washeteria”.     Today we know them as Laundromats.

What does the future hold for us?  If the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is an indication, we’ll live in a world of increasingly portable gadgets and devices that communicate wirelessly and derive their power from the sun’s rays.   Here are some of the standouts:

Tivit Mobile Digital TV Receiver- $120.00:  This device which looks like a sleek walkie-talkie enables your smartphone to pick up the signal of local television stations that you can watch anywhere, while riding in a car or a train or sitting in an airport terminal.

Pocket Radar – $249.00: Using Doppler technology this hand held device no larger than a deck of cards can clock your son’s baseball pitch or check the speed of a passing car.  It’s like having a personal radar gun at your disposal.

Kodak Slice – $349.00 This 14 megapixel camera uses a large LCD screen to provide all the instruction of how and where you want your photos.  Easy upload to email, youtube and social media like Facebook.

Solar-powered blue tooth hands free car kit – $69.99.  When your blue tooth is out of juice, this can fill in.  Attaches with a suction cup to your windshield and is powered by the sun, even in a cloudy city like Syracuse.

There are hundreds more inventions on display at the CES.  My guess is the best ideas are yet to come.  30 million people are currently unemployed and some have given up hope of finding a job since there are six applicants for every opening and expansion is not yet in site.

With all this free time I believe splendid conversations are taking place at the dinner table.  After all, why invent something when you don’t have to?  The real estate bubble of the last 15 years took time to blow up.  Working 60 hour weeks to secure, furnish and manage houses we couldn’t afford didn’t leave much time for creativity.   With record home forclosures leading to smaller, simpler residences, there’s time to think of the next big thing.

The other incubator of invention is the U.S. Military.  Some of the most vital technology we use today; satellites and night-vision to name a couple, were all developed for War.  We’ve sure got an abundance of that right now.

So what is the next big thing?  What is truly “out of the box”?  Chances are, it’s being worked on now.  Here is what I think we need:

Vertical highways.  We’re running out of room on the ground to build the highways needed to accommodate increasing vehicular traffic.  It’s time to go up.  As planes travel criss-crossing paths in layers up to 32,000 feet, we should be able to drive cars that hover up to 2,000 feet.  That’s the height of a 20 story building.  Air bag technology will advance to provide for a safe and soft landing when computer glitches accidentally drop cars from above.  And all that asphalt will get dug up and replaced with green space, parkland and crops.  Less black asphalt will cool down our warming planet.

GPS becomes the driver.  Today we type our destination into the dashboard computer and follow the directions by driving the old fashioned way.  Someday we’ll hop in with a magazine, punch in the address and hit the big green “go” button.  The computer will use the same satellite direction to operate the car, and with computers in charge, car crashes will be a thing of the past. When the computer crashes as all computers do?  It’s those air bags I mentioned.

Harnessing a year’s worth of comfort.  We pay exorbitant sums to cool our homes and offices in the summer, only to reverse direction and spend more money to heat them all winter.  The time spent in “neutral” is small, meaning we’re in a constant battle to overcome nature outside.  We need to find a way to harvest and store all the heat and humidity of the summer so we can use it in the winter, and vice versa.    Every road and sidewalk in the snowy north will have summer heat stored beneath and accessed during the winter to preclude the need for plowing and shoveling.  It will all just melt.

No physical harm can come from another person when we are able to activate a “force field” all around us.  Think of the freedom we would have.  Any one of us could walk any place at any hour, and with the force field turned on, we’d be protected by an invisible bubble of impenetrable energy.  Go ahead and pull that knife or gun.  It’s not going anywhere. No more Orders of Protection.  The “force” is with us.

Virtual House Calls: Sick people are too weak and too infectious to travel to a crowded waiting room to be seen by a doctor.  Doctors are too busy to travel to individual homes as they used to.  We should be able to ingest a substance that is tracked and analyzed by a computer at the doctors office for an accurate and immediate diagnosis of our ailment.   Our conversation takes place by videophone and a prescription is transmitted to the pharmacist, no script necessary.  I haven’t figured out a transport system for the medicine, so we may still need to take our weak and infectious selves to the drug store.

Those are some of my futuristic ideas.  What are yours?  The crazier the better. Our children or grandchildren may get to see them one day.