This Account covers research dating from the early 1960s in the field of low-melting molten salts and hydrates,which has recently become popular under the rubric of "ionic liquids". It covers understanding gained in the principal author's laboratories (initially in Australia, but mostly in the U.S.A.) from spectroscopic, dynamic, and thermodynamic studies and includes recent applications of this understanding in the fields of energy conversion and biopreservation. Both protic and aprotic varieties of ionic liquids are included, but recent studies have focused on the protic class because of the special applications made possible by the highly variable proton activities available in these liquids.In this Account, we take a broad view of ionic liquids (using the term in its current sense of liquids comprised of ions and melting below 100°C). We include, along with the general cases of organic cation systems, liquids in which common inorganic cations (like Mg 2+ and Ca 2+ ) strongly bind a hydration or solvation shell and then behave like large cation systems and melt below 100°C.We will try to organize a wide variety of measurements on low-melting ionic liquid systems into a coherent body of knowledge that is relevant to the ionic liquid field as it is currently developing.Under the expanded concept of the field, ionic liquid studies commenced in the Angell laboratory in 1962 with a study of the transport properties of the hydrates of Mg(NO 3 ) 2 and Ca(NO 3 ) 2 . These were described as melts of "large weak-field cations" 1 and their properties correlated with those of normal anhydrous molten salts via their effective cation radii, the sum of the normal radius plus one water molecule diameter. This notion was followed in 1966 with a full study under the title "A new class of molten salt mixtures" in which the hydrated cations were treated as independent cation species. The large cations mixed ideally with ordinary inorganic cations such as Na + and K + , to give solutions in which such cohesion indicators as the glass transition temperature, T g , changed linearly with composition. The concept proved quite fruitful, and a field ("hydrate melts" or "solvate melts") developed in its wake in which asymmetric anions like SCN -and NO 2 -were used with solvated cations to create a very wide range of systems that were liquid at room temperature, while remaining ionic in their general properties.The validity of the molten salt analogy was given additional conviction by the observation that transition metal ions such as Ni(II) and Co(II) could be found in the complex anion states NiCl 4 2-and CoCl 4 2-when added to the "hydrate melt" chlorides. 2 Of special interest here was the observation 3 of extreme downfield NMR proton chemical shifts of hydrate protons when the hydrated cation was Al 3+ . These lay much further downfield than did the protons in strong mineral acids at the same concentration, leading to the design of solutions of highly acidic character from salts that would usually be considered neutral. Inde...