Robert Lewis Fowler, a retired Westinghouse electrical engineer, died of cancer Sunday at Central Carolina Hospital in Sanford, N.C. The former Ellicott City resident was 68.

Born in Whittier, N.C., and raised in Bryson City, N.C., he earned an electrical engineering degree from North Carolina State University.

Mr. Fowler met his future wife at her summer job at a drugstore lunch counter in Sanford.

"One day at lunch, he came to the fountain area for a ham sandwich, and their eyes locked through the pie case," according to a family history.

After completing his degree, he joined the Westinghouse Defense Division in Linthicum, where he developed display, film recording and scan converter systems. Family members said that a satellite photograph of the Earth received by the ground recorder that he designed hangs in the Smithsonian Institution.

Mr. Fowler spent more than two years in Iran in the 1970s working on a highway radar system. He later wrote Westinghouse contracts. He retired in 1998.

Services will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at Bridges-Cameron Funeral Home in Sanford.

Survivors include his wife of 45 years, the former Judy Wilkie, a retired Baltimore County public schools English teacher; a son, Nathaniel Lewis Fowler of Berlin, Germany; a sister, Betty Fowler Collins of Thomasville, N.C.; and a brother, Harold Fowler of Morganton, N.C.