This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Charles Taze Russell, born in 1852 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh, founded the Bible Student movement in Pittsburgh in the 1870s, a Bible study organization that grew out of his own independent reading of scripture rather than any inherited denominational structure. The movement he built was later organized formally as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, giving his independent Bible classes a lasting institutional form.
Russell's teaching developed a specific chronological claim beginning with the second volume of his Studies in the Scriptures, published in 1889. Building on Daniel's Gentile Times, reckoned from the fall of Jerusalem, Russell calculated that this chronology would reach its end in 1914, an event he and his followers read as marking the close of the present order and the invisible establishment of Christ's heavenly kingdom, a specific date named decades before it arrived.
The organization Russell built around that Bible study and its chronological framework would, after his death, become the direct ancestor of Jehovah's Witnesses, a lineage that traces back to the Pittsburgh Bible classes he began in the 1870s rather than to any later reorganization, carrying forward both his organizational structure and the chronological method his 1914 calculation had established.