This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, the same year Charles Taze Russell's Gentile Times chronology had named, Russell and his followers did not treat the war as a failure of the prediction. They took the war itself, rather than the invisible heavenly event they had also anticipated for that year, as striking confirmation that the underlying chronology was sound, reading the outbreak of global conflict as evidence their calculation had been correct all along.
That reading let the movement absorb a year that might otherwise have produced the kind of open disappointment other date bound movements experienced when an expected event failed to appear in any visible form. The war supplied a visible, world historical event to point to in place of the invisible kingdom establishment the chronology had originally predicted.
Russell died in 1916, two years after the date his own calculation had named, having lived just long enough to see the war he read as confirmation but not to see the movement's longer development. Leadership passed to his successor, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, under whom the movement continued producing new chronological expectations in the years that followed.