(no, it is not an April fool....)
Basically it is a Phil Wood quality hub with a pump in it, aimed at wheelchair and bicycle users.
there is a write-up here;
http://pardo.net/bike/pic/fail-039/index.html
it even got a mention in the daily mail
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2123955/Pump-Hub-inflates-bicycle-tyres-ride-shuts-automatically-done.html
in which they didn't accuse it of giving you cancer....
https://www.cultofmac.com/284067/pump-hub/
So you can't buy these any more I think (I found a website pump-hub.com on the wayback machine but it doesn't seem to be live any more) so the market may have spoken. .
But was it a daft idea or did it have merit? It seemed expensive and complicated by comparison with a pump that you carry. Normal hubs go wrong too; I can't think that this would, erm, improve the chances of the hub going wrong. I don't know if the idea was that you always had this connected to the tyre or what, but in the event of a real flat tyre, it might be pretty useless; it takes a mile or two of riding to fully inflate a soft tyre so with a completely flat tyre you would presumably have fix the puncture and then sit twirling the wheel round long enough to get some air into the tyre before riding to complete the inflation process. A mile and a half on a 700C wheel is about 1000 turns of the wheel; you would have to manage a good fraction of that to get the tyre up to pressure.
You would need two pump-hubs to be able cope with tyre deflation in either tyre. The rate at which air is added is not high enough to cope with anything more than a slow puncture whilst you are riding and not long after you stop riding a tyre with a slow-ish puncture goes completely flat and you are stuck.
If the hoses are not connected to the valves then you have to remember to carry them (just like a pump) and if not fitted, there is a hole in the hub through which crud will get in, potentially wrecking the innards of the pump. If you leave the bike parked with the hoses connected, some light fingered blighter will probably pinch them.
One reason for wanting a pump hub might be if you can't easily get the wheel out to fix a puncture. So IGHs and hub brakes for example. Yet the hubs offered were QR ones for derailleur gears etc , which are easy to remove. An add-on pump that mounts to an extant hub might have been a viable option but one such was not offered. I guess there are a few people who genuinely can't use any other kind of pump but these are few and far between. If you are likely to get slow punctures then this invention is only of much use if you ride your bike every day; otherwise you will come to your bike after two or three days and it will have two flat tyres.
The bicycle is at heart a very simple machine; there are any number of ways of making it more expensive, more complicated, and less versatile. This is another of them.
BTW it is easy to combine things and come up with 'a new invention' that might make sense to some folk; for example anyone who needs a dishwasher also needs a toilet; so you could 'invent' the 'dishwasher-toilet' (an integrated plumbing installation, with optional bidet facility).....why has no one thought of this before.....??....
and so forth.....cheers
