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.