How I Made a Fortune With a 'Fool' Idea" (American Legion Monthly, Sept 1928)
The pattern
This still is filed under If-then promise.
Define
A conditional contract: if you do this, you get that. The sentence can be tested against the reader's own case.
Mechanism
Specificity does the persuading. The if names the action. The then names the outcome. Hedging kills it.
Verdict
We can name both the action and the result without adjectives
Why it works
The headline is a first-person reversal: it puts the reader's own likely objection - this is a fool idea - inside quotation marks and then defeats it with a number. Because the story is told by the man who did it rather than by a company, every claim arrives as autobiography, which is far harder to argue with than a sales assertion. The testimonials are not generic; each one names the writer's former job, so the reader searching the column for someone like himself always finds one. The $1,000 Reward box performs the neatest move in the ad, openly conceding that not everyone earns these amounts, which buys back the credibility the big numbers just spent.
Steal this when
Reach for this structure when you are selling a method or a course and you have real, attributable results from ordinary people. It is the right shape when your prospect's first reaction is scepticism about the category itself, because the founder story plus an occupation-matched testimonial column answers that before the offer appears.