1914 came after 1913 and war isn't an omen.
You could honestly claim the degree of exclusiveness of a literal 144,000
if you taught that Jesus was created and to be worshipped and invisibly appeared
in 1874, Adam and Eve appeared 6,000 years before that and were Caucasian, the
earth was created 42,000 years before that, and if you publicly spurned Christian
charity except for donations for Russell's publications > dummy companies so
Russell could use gifts to pay of his alimony. Defining Christianity that way,
he was also right in predicting that it would come to ruin.
Note: Wikipedia says he correctly predicted global warming (?). This might be
surprising except this is what he actually predicted:
http://www.pastor-russell.com/legacy/warming.html
- predicted that God would make the world like the Garden of Eden for the ones
He saved for eternity, which would require that the parts of the world less hos-
pitable to human life and farming would have to change into places that are per-
fect for it, which isn't the same thing and didn't happen, and
- guessed about the possibility (didn't predict) that his prediction of a per-
iod of trouble (1874 to 1914 would be 40 years of the worst trouble the world
has known, later known to be one of his failed predictions) could be marked off
by drastically different climate than that hospitable to human life, and that
when Jesus visibly returned (Oct., 1914, Oct., 1915, a few years after 1916)
there would be climate changes to bring about a Garden of Eden-type climate by
the end of the subsequent millenium, which didn't happen, either. ("Zion's Watch
Tower," Sept., 1883, p.8, Sept., 1886, p.1, Aug., 1896, p.189)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#Recent
He claimed in 1903 and 1913 that the trend would continue of polar ice caps
getting smaller as they were doing in his present time, and they would drift to-
ward the equator. The quality of the data before 1950 is debatable, but there's
no indication the polar ice caps were doing any more than going through their
annual changes in shape in his lifetime. The Arctic Sea ice has gotten notably
smaller and the Antarctic ice has grown a bit since about 1957, and they haven't
drifted to the equator. ("Zion's Watch Tower," Jan., 1913, p.11, May, 1903, p.
131)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_ice_packs
In the 1913 example, he threw in a support for the canopy effect, which isn't
indicated by science and would require a batch of attending miracles to pull
off, as part of an attempt to justify his literal interpretation of the Noah
flood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_geology#Vapor_canopy
One change that went on in Russell's lifetime and since that he and others may
have noticed is that urban areas were growing, and urban areas are warmer than
countryside, but that isn't what he reported.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
