Mark Fuller will never be mistaken for Moses, who parted the Red Sea. But the 47-year-old entrepreneur defies physics and captures the imagination by building fountains that bend and shape water to his will.

As head of Los Angeles based WET Design, Fuller controls cascading water so it lands without a ripple. He makes water look like a laser beam. He forces water to climb stairs. He shoots water up to rooftops of high-rise buildings. He sets water on fire. He transforms water into marbles. He even tames water so people can walk on it.

“I understand water, and water understands me. We get into each others heads,” says Fuller, who launched his business 16 years ago after dazzling visitors at Walt Disney World with his liquid creations. “I guess I’m lucky that I’m not attracted to plutonium.”

WET Design now has more than 100 major fountains flowing, and Fuller, who boasts 50 patents for high-tech nozzles, valves and robots, wants to use his firm’s rare blend of engineering and entertainment to change landscapes all over the world.

It’s already happening in Singapore, where WET is conceptualizing a 1.5 mile-long series of billowing mist fountains that culminate in a shimmering water monument. And in Budapest, Hungary, where it is creating a version of Niagara Falls. And the Middle East, where its aquatic acrobatics will dominate a 40 story hotel atrium.

“You can’t go to the Yellow Pages for that effect,” says Mirage Resorts Chairman Stephen Wynn, who worked with WET to develop a computer-driven musical fountain show on the nine-acre lake at his Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. “This is a small band of creatively brilliant people.”

Adds architect Jon Jerde, a WET client like Coca-Cola and the Sultan of Brunei: “Water has been hanging around for centuries. Then WET Design showed up and reinvented it.”

With $16 million in 1998 revenue, Fuller’s company makes cash—as well as a splash.

WET’s project cost from $300,000 to into the millions of dollars, but clients are willing to pay because people want to see water do weird, wild and wonderful things. Fountains are another part of the experience economy, and they boost sales for retailers, occupancy rates for hotels and rents for commercial builders.

“The people at WET add a dimension that makes a place memorable,” says Jack Illes, vice president of strategic design at TrizecHahn, a San Diego based real estate developer. “They add landmark status and considerable value.”

But WET’s secret, says Jim Garland, one of Fuller’s design directors, is to avoid getting swept away in a torrent of creative excess. “You can’t be so innovative that you lose money,” Garland says. “There’s a big difference between the bleeding edge and the leading edge.”

Growing up on the edge of the desert in Salt Lake City, Fuller was always fascinated by water. His first big project took place in his mother’s garden, where he built a waterfall.

As an engineering student at the University of Utah, he wrote his undergraduate thesis on “axisymmetric laminar fluid flow,” which taught him how to make water look like a glass rod coming out of a nozzle.

After studying design at Stanford University, Fuller spent nearly six years at Walt Disney Imagineering. One of his most enduring creations at Disney is the LeapFrog fountain at EPCOT, a series of playful water arches that seem to hang motionless over people’s heads before hitting the ground without so much as a spatter.

Says Marty Sklar, vice chairman of Walt Disney Imagineering, “Lots of people understand technology, but Mark understands how to use technology to tell a story.”

Once it was up and gushing, the LeapFrog so enchanted a Texas real estate developer that he asked Fuller to design a water icon for I.M Pei’s Fountain Place project in Dallas.

The freelance gig was a success, and Fuller decided to leave Disney. Using 13 credit cards, his kitchen table as an office and the back yard as a lab for garden-hose experiments, he started WET design in 1983.

“Mark was willing to take an entrepreneurial risk to play with water,” Sklar says, “He saw it could be fun, as well as a business.”

When Fuller met Wynn in the mid-1990s, he saw just how big a business it could be.

The hotelier wanted an astonishing and artistic outdoor attraction to complement the Bellagio’s sweeping botanical conservatory and elegant gallery of master paintings, so he began brainstorming with WET.

Fuller and Claire Kahn, another design director at WET, dived into the project, trying to create a fountain grand enough for the vast lake Wynn was digging at Bellagio.

Instead, they came up with 1,200 individually programmed fountains that dance in harmony to a romantic repertoire of music—including favorites from Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti and A Chorus Line.

Sometimes, during the music’s legato passages, the fountains’ interpretive movement is smooth and continuous. Other times, when the music is staccato, the water jets pulsate rapidly.

“It’s a joyous experience,” Kahn says. “everybody loves it whether they’re intellectuals or those with no background in the fine arts.”

The entire production, which includes nearly 5,500 computerized lights underwater and state-of-the-art device that blankets the lake with fog, took three years and almost $75 million to complete.

But it wasn’t easy. Despite a $200,000 mock-up and three-dimensional computer simulation, ice crystals formed in the fountain valves, causing them to misfire in rehearsals.

Still, Fuller persevered. With his wife Susan at his side, he and his colleagues worked on the extravaganza with Wynn from midnight to dawn last summer.

“Mark invested all of himself. There was nothing left he didn’t put on the table,” Wynn says. “He muscled it through.”

For his part, Fuller simply says: “We bet WET on this project.” And the wager paid off.

Since the Bellagio opened last year, the WET world has been getting bigger every day.

Passers-by who experience the firm’s towering tile fountains in Lisbon, Portugal, marvel at the giant 10 foot bubbles they produce. Down under, visitors to Crown Casino are blown away by WET’s water towers, which are capped by 100- foot fireballs that light up Melbourne’s riverfront. And they’re buzzing in the United Arab Emirates about the fiber-optic fountains that will create water resembling sparks from a welder’s torch.

“Our goal,” Fuller says, “is to make water do thinks that amaze people.”