The fountains at Versailles and Villa d’Este are nice. But they’re mere squirts compared with Mark Fuller’s high-tech creations.

Mark Fuller is in the business of creating spectacles—designed to make you stop in mid-stride and catch your breath. You may have seen one of his fountains—a brash choreography of water and light—if you’ve been to Epcot, the new Bellagio resort in Las Vegas, Chicago’s McCormick Place or 90 additional locations throughout the U.S., the Middle East and Asia.

What you won’t see is the wizardry behind the water shows. Fuller, who got a B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Utah and a masters in design from Stanford, owns more than 50 patents on water control, lighting and air-compression devices, as well as “laminar” stream technology, which turns water jets into shapes that appear solid and motionless.

Visual feats aside, Fuller, 47, has managed to pull off something of an economic miracle—at least in the world of hydraulics: He claims his technology allows for energy savings of 80% or more and brings down project costs by 50%. “Traditional fountains use pumps and pipes,” he says. “Ours use compressed air, which can be stored—that makes a big difference if your fountain goes ‘bang’ into the sky only once every 15 minutes.” Especially if you’re shelling out between $350,000 and $30 million for a water show.

Fuller got his feet wet in the business 16 years ago, while heading a special-effects team at Disney. A real estate developer saw LeapFrog, Fuller’s fountain at Epcot, and offered him a moonlighting job at a large commercial project in Dallas, designed by I.M.Pei. The result was Fountain Place—and a hankering to go off on his own. Fuller founded WET (water entertainment technologies) Design, now of Universal City, California, by maxing out 13 credit cards. His lab was the yard behind his house and a couple of garden hoses.

Like an architect, Fuller bills out his time, and that of his 105 people, at an hourly rate. The work starts with discussions focused on client objectives—making a visual statement, drawing a particular kind of traffic, solving a spatial problem—and moves into the design phase, rendering two or three different ideas. Fuller says the conceptual end is a break-even proposition; he makes his money on hardware. His final take is about half of the total cost of a project. This year, he says revenues will run $20 million or so. Roughly 7% of that will be plowed back into R & D.

What sort of warranty do you get on this elaborate plumbing? The entire project is covered for a year. The performance of a fountain—as long as the clients service those 500 jets that are supposed to shoot water 100 feet into the air—is guaranteed for at least 40 years.