Edward Lowe, whose accidental discovery of a product he called Kitty Litter made cats more welcome household company and created a half-billion-dollar industry, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Sarasota, Fla. He was 75 and had divided his time between homes in Arcadia, Fla., and Cassopolis, Mich.

His son, Tom, said the cause was complications from surgery for cerebral hemorrhage.

Cats have been domesticated since ancient Egypt, but until a fateful January day in 1947, those who kept them indoors full time paid a heavy price. For all their vaunted obsession with paw-licking cleanliness, cats, whose constitutions were adapted for arid desert climes, make such an efficient use of water that they produce a highly concentrated urine that is one of the most noxious effluences of the animal kingdom.

Boxes filled with sand, sawdust or wood shavings provided a measure of relief from the resulting stench, but not enough to make cats particularly welcome in discriminating homes.

In a story he always relished telling, that began to change in 1947, when Mr. Lowe, a 27-year-old Navy veteran who had been working in his father's sawdust business, received a visit from a cat-loving Cassopolis neighbor named Kaye Draper, whose sand box had frozen.