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→Later Developments
George Millay, who famously founded Sea World in San Diego and later Florida, took the idea developed by Sellner and also increasingly noticed in the 1960s and 1970s incorporating splash pads and the first wavepool opening in Alabama. Waterslides became very popular within existing parks, so much so long lines were always evident. All these gave Millay the idea that a purpose-built water park might be enough to be profitable. He needed a warm, year-round place to have such a park to keep revenues steady. As Orlando, Florida already hosted well known amusement locations and had the weather that Millay needed, Wet n’ Wild was founded there as the first purpose-built water park in 1977. When it opened, the first year proved disappointing, loosing about $600,000. However, Millay did not fret and from the second year it began to make a profit. Although the park closed in 2016, it became the blueprint for most other parks in the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia. Demonstrating the success of the park, Wet n'Wild averaged about 1.3 million visitors a year in its later years. Millay took the Wet n' Wild brand to many areas and other countries, expanding the brand and building new ater parks.
Since the 1970s, there has been a rapid expansion and often competition among parks to develop new types of slides, rides, pools and even novel features within water parks. For instance, for northern regions of the United States, where the weather is too cold for much of the year for water parks, a novel feature has been creating an ice skating rink in the main plaza by placing underground cooling pipes. By the early 1980s, communities around the United States began to realize that they could make their area more appealing to tourists by building water parks. This was the case for Wisconsin Dells in southern Wisconsin, not far from Chicago. In that case, several five major water parks were built near each other, allowing the town to claim itself as the 'water park capital' or Americaof the world. This inspired not only new water parks to be built across the country, where today there are more than 400 water parks in the United States.
==Modern Trends==
