The movement began as a magazine and a study group, and the institution came afterwards.
Charles Taze Russell, a Pittsburgh haberdasher dissatisfied with the doctrine of hell, began publishing Zion's Watch Tower in 1879 and gathered a loose network of Bible Students around his writings. Russell taught that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and that a harvest period would end in 1914, and when 1914 brought a world war rather than the expected end, the date was reinterpreted rather than dropped: 1914 became the year Christ began to rule invisibly in heaven, which remains the movement's position.
The transformation into a centralised body was the work of Joseph Franklin Rutherford, a lawyer who took control after Russell's death in 1916 amid legal disputes and a substantial secession. Rutherford imposed door-to-door preaching as an obligation on every member, replaced elected local elders with appointed servants, adopted the name Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931 to distinguish the body from rival Bible Student groups, and introduced most of the practices now associated with it, the refusal of flag salutes, of military service and of the celebration of birthdays and Christmas.
Doctrinally the movement stands well outside mainstream Christianity on deliberate grounds. It holds that only the Father, Jehovah, is God, that Jesus is his first creation, and that the holy spirit is God's active force rather than a person; that the soul is not immortal and the wicked are destroyed rather than tormented; and that a limited number, 144,000, rule with Christ in heaven while the remainder of the faithful live for ever on a restored earth. It publishes its own translation of the Bible, the New World Translation, whose renderings at several disputed verses are strongly contested by scholars outside the movement.