Ask one of Jehovah's Witnesses

[Tonus]

Tonus, this is not something that has ever bothered me personally. The way I see it, the human thing is to figure out when the end will come. I am sure that when you went to meetings you knew about 10 different theories of when the end will come. But it was Jesus that said, after asked repeatedly, that no man knows. So I think it was wrong and inappropriate for CTR to even have that conjecture. I care more about the fact that he sat down with the bible and started reading it from an unbiased view. Like where the dead really are. The truth about hellfire. Or even the trinity. I still don't know where I'll come down on all of this in the end but the dates are definitely a mental fart that you could even argue were inappropriate. I will never serve a god because I know the date when judgment day will come. I'll only serve a god that I love and is worthy of worship

I agree with this.  I think that it is in our nature to fear/despise uncertainty-- we want to KNOW.  So it's not really surprising that people have been trying to set a date for the world's end for centuries, in spite of the very clear admonition in the Bible itself that it wasn't for us to know and that therefore we needn't worry about it.  Russell was really just carrying on a time-worn Christian tradition of trying to pinpoint the date of Christ's second coming.

And it's difficult to say the extent to which it was a con or how much they believed it.  Setting a specific date has an upside (people will flock to your side, offering support and money) and a potentially ruinous downside (when the date passes and nothing happens, you are discredited).  I think that Russell (and many other such men, including some in the present day like Harold Camping) was convinced he had it right, and was disappointed when his numbers fell short, again and again.  I think that Rutherford was a more practical individual who understood that what he was doing amounted to marketing.  His claims that scripture positively identified 1925 as the year when biblical men of fame would be resurrected and become leaders to humankind led to the building of a palatial estate in San Diego, ostensibly to house these worthy men but which became Rutherford's vacation home (which he continued to enjoy the use of during the Great Depression).  This backfired when the year came and went, and instead of just moderate losses in membership as in years before, the movement almost disintegrated, losing around 75-80% of the membership over the next year or two.  Rutherford would rebuild the organization and he would continue to point to certain dates, but never with the certainty and boldness that he used when promoting 1925.

Later leadership seems to have learned to keep things more circumspect, though they almost blew it with the 1975 predictions.  They promoted the year as the end without ever explicitly stating it (though a number of statements were pretty unambiguous, such as referring to "the few months remaining before Armageddon" in a 1974 Kingdom Ministry) but they came close enough that the membership was taking drastic steps, such as taking their kids out of school and running up debt that they assumed would not have to be repaid.  This "unwise" action was joined by those who sold their worldly possessions to dedicate themselves to preaching full-time.  The organization lauded those who did so, but offered nothing when the end failed to materialize.  They didn't even address the issue until declining membership numbers forced them to do so in 1980, at which point they blamed the members for 'reading more into it' than had been said, which was not true.

Sorry if I'm wordy, but I lived through some of this and can clearly remember some of the later stuff (from the 80s and 90s).  I didn't look into the JW history until years after I'd made my break from the organization, so I read it with great interest.  I still find it fascinating.