Who built the Dubai Fountain?

The fountain was officially inaugurated on 8 May 2009, on the lake at the foot of the Burj Khalifa, which was still eight months from opening. It cost about 800 million dirhams, roughly $218 million. It was built for Emaar, the developer of Downtown Dubai. The man whose company designed it had started out making water jump at Epcot.

From a Utah backyard to Epcot

Mark Fuller grew up in Salt Lake City. As a teenager he dug a pond in his parents' backyard, then added lagoons and underwater tunnels after a trip to Disneyland.

At the University of Utah he studied civil engineering. For his final-year project he and two classmates built a nozzle that shoots laminar water: a stream so smooth it looks like a solid glass rod. At Disney, as an Imagineer, one of the company's ride and attraction designers, he used it for the Leapfrog Fountains at Epcot. Arcs of water hop from one planter to the next.

In 1983 Fuller and two fellow Imagineers, Melanie Simon and Alan Robinson, set up their own company in Los Angeles. They called it WET, for Water Entertainment Technologies. Their best-known work before Dubai was the fountain on the lake in front of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, which opened in 1998. Its tallest jets reach about 240 feet, 73 metres.

How the Dubai Fountain works

Emaar wanted the centrepiece of its new district bigger still. WET's fountain stretches 275 metres, about 900 feet, across a man-made lake of 30 acres. At full stretch it can hold 83,000 litres of water in the air at once.

The jets are of different kinds. Robotic nozzles swing and sway in time to the music. The highest shots come from WET's Shooters, which fire water with compressed air. That is why each burst ends in a loud boom.

Super Shooters reach about 73 metres. Extreme Shooters reach about 152 metres, 500 feet, as high as a 50-storey building. They are used least, because they take the longest to build up pressure. After dark, 6,600 lights and 25 coloured projectors light the water.

The shows are set to everything from Arabic songs to Andrea Bocelli's "Con te partirò". The Burj Khalifa is the backdrop, and the fountain was dancing in front of it months before the tower opened.

Where to stand

Walk out of Dubai Mall onto the promenade and go to the marble railing at the water's edge, with the Burj Khalifa ahead of you across the lake. During a show, watch for the tallest columns of water. Listen for the boom that comes with each one: it is the compressed air behind the Shooters, not an explosion.

Hear it where it happened

The Trevlo tour of Dubai Mall and Downtown Dubai tells this story at the fountain promenade, its third stop. It starts at the mall's main entrance and its waterfall of diving figures. After the fountain it goes to the foot of the Burj Khalifa, the Address Downtown hotel and the Dubai Opera. Six stops, about twenty-seven minutes of listening, at your own pace.

The first stop is free to play on this page, and your first tour in the app is free.