For a very long time now humans have had a love affair with fountains
it could be a nice gurgle in a park that spices up a picnic
a seal vomiting water through all eternity to amuse tourists
Or a young boy who made his dad pull over
Because he really really has to go. Over and over again
Whatever people just enjoy being near water that does stuff
But no one enjoys a fountain more than this man. Mark Fuller the CEO and co-founder
Of wet design for he is the creator of this
this and for just two hundred million or so dollars this
I recently visited WET's headquarters in Burbank, California
Partly to find out how mark turned fountains into hi-tech performance art, but mostly so that I could do this
If you've ever run across a 300 foot stream of dancing water or a sidewalk that spits out fire
there's a good chance that the people at WET made it. The company has pursued this very unique line of work since
1983 that has done hundreds of projects all over the world. Although it's perhaps best known for the Bellagio fountain
Almost every piece of the fountains, the lights, the water nozzles
the audio gear, gets designed and manufactured here. And much of it is the brainchild of Mark which brings us to an obvious question
How and why does one become a fountain man?
I've never really had a major surgery
But I have to tell you, I'm a little bit afraid that if they ever take the scalpel
What comes out may be clear not red?
Marks enthusiasm for playful spectacles came to him as a young boy while on that most American of adventures
A visit to Disneyland. I was nine and we made our first trip to Disneyland and we left from Salt Lake City
then was like a
16 hour drive to Los Angeles
And I just fell in love with what Walt Disney had created and I thought man if you can't be God
Walt's got a pretty close second here and I set myself a goal of working for Disney when I grew up
And then you actually end up becoming an imagineer? I did when I graduated from Stanford
I went to work right for Disney and there could have been no more perfect you know
postgraduate experience than going from Stanford to Disney and I learned so much there. And you're at Disney for a while and then you
And a couple of partners decide to break off and start wet
And that's when he got a call from Steve Wynn the Las Vegas real estate tycoon. He says here's the goals
I want people to not think they're in Las Vegas
I want them to be completely in a separate space and he said we need to tie this, you know to really
Beautiful music there's a third condition
I think oh my gosh what says he says this has to be the biggest thing you'll ever do in your life
That's a scary thought. We kept that for a while
I think we've gone a little beyond that but it was Steve really put us on the map
Steven Spielberg once described the Bellagio fountains as the greatest single piece of public entertainment on planet Earth. And even though they've been
around for decades. They remain iconic amusing locals, tourists, and movie goers alike
But what really fascinated me about WET's story is how the fountains are made
The engineering and material science pushed the limits of what's possible
At it's hard water in a tube wants to be this chaotic
Sloshing around thing and what you found a way to do was to to tame it and send it in one
direction. Technique called laminar flow what's like the kids or laminar flow?
Well if you think of water molecules
like a bunch of people kind of running around and somebody says get out of here and they all cram towards the door
That's like water coming out of your faucet or your garden hose
but if you've imagined a
military parade where everybody left left left right left. You know marching in parallel step then everybody
Exits the door if it's six people wide in the theater
It's six people wide through the nozzle, the door six people wide down the street
So you get those water molecules all marching at the same speed in the same direction. It's not unlike
coherent light in the laser beam in essence
You guys do everything from the you know the architecture all the way up to building how does this process work?
Sometimes a client will come and say we just saw the Bellagio or something you've done. They engage us for what we call a
concept design phase of work and we'll come up with several ideas that we're excited about
From that we do the basic architecture
surrounding it and then we'll do the engineering for the fountain part
I've no interest in making stuff that somebody else does that's part of doing something new. We have a new
device, then of course we design and make that.
This means inventing things like this dragon light contraption that helped make the dubai fountain stand out
This is our biggest underwater light. They're unbelievably bright
Or this fountain that's on fire
fire and water. That is cool
It's borderline insane to make so much hardware but Mark has embraced the madness
How many square feet is your whole facility?
You know I should know that I'm gonna say it's around two hundred thousand give or take of that
Their workshops are huge, super clean, and whimsical with a giant robot
Hidden doors that lead to Mark's personal office. This is my hangout. This is your hideaway. This is my hideaway.
A glorious wood shop
It smells so good in here
It does doesn't it
And even a gym with Eric the trainer this guy does push-ups like the Jack LaLanne of today
There's also a lot of hard tech that goes into the fountains
from advancements in chemistry to new kinds of optics
Sometimes you have to dig down one level beneath the engineering to the actual science
We have four science labs here
We have scanning electron microscopes, high-pressure gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, all sorts of things to really analyze
materials and how they'll interact with each other and with water and so forth. All of this technology eventually comes together at the final assembly
Which was designed by Garett here. Officially this is called the bright room
But this is where we house our surface mount assembly equipment and then the final assembly and test of the lights
Okay
So our customers constantly come to us and just say hey do something easy. Just do something you haven't done before
And do it in a way that's never been done. Yeah, so that's what we're constantly push ourselves
This most recent thing that we're working on is 20,000 lights over 2100 shooters
300 robotic devices and several million gallons in the basin
Having to top itself every time out makes life tough on WET
And so do the boom and bust cycles of the business. It seems like to me it's just hard to keep getting bigger and better
Yeah, you know I read once every every great author goes to bed at night
wondering if he'll ever wake up with a new story idea so I go to bed at night
thinking, you know, well, we have a new idea tomorrow and uh
So far, we they keep coming
There's something in water that really draws. You know you and I we're like 70 ish percent water, right?
And we're born out of water coming out of our mother's womb. It's such a fantastic substance
Now we are doing a few
exciting things for the future which are something for consumers. Well, yeah to
democratize what we're doing everybody doesn't have some big pile of money to do a public feature
But why shouldn't you be able to do that at home? Why shouldn't you be able to to be the coolest family?
You know where all the PTA families want to come and have the party
You know in the summer party of your house cuz you've got this great
thing in your house or yard
A Bellagio fountain in my backyard to impress the Joneses. Yes, please just so long as there's plenty of fire