In August 1783, at the future site of the Eiffel Tower, Benjamin Franklin watched two brothers launch the first hydrogen balloon. It breezed north for 45 minutes and plummeted in the hamlet of Gonesse where frightened peasants attacked the contraption with rocks, knives and pitchforks before dragging the monster’s wheezing remains through town on a horse.

The villagers weren’t entirely wrong. Balloons are the dominion of misfits who don’t belong on earth, or even on other modes of sky travel like rockets, helicopters, or airplanes, whose seats are commandeered by the rational, the heroic, or the rest of us just trying to get from Atlanta to Des Moines. To choose to travel by basket and balloon requires two personality traits: ingenuity and recklessness. As in, not only does someone have to somehow get their hands on one — which often means designing it themselves — but they’re capricious enough to let Mother Nature steer. Naturally, hot air balloons were the prison escape vehicle for both Lex Luthor and Paddington Bear.

On film, balloons give a character more character. They’ve encouraged athletes like Buster Keaton and Pearl White of “The Perils of Pauline” to prove their mettle. Thanks to the traditional bottle of champagne packed to appease bystanders, a wicker basket can also be a cozy setting for cranks to realize they’re safe being vulnerable, as when Bill Murray opens up about his divorce in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” or in the climax of the noxiously gassy romantic comedy “The Ugly Truth,” when the worst love scene in Hollywood history is redeemed by the audience’s relief that this aggravating couple is sequestered 1,000 feet in the air. In Tom Harper’s “The Aeronauts,” now in theaters and on Amazon Prime Video Dec. 20, the Victorian meteorologist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) escapes the confines of London’s Royal Society to embark on a record-breaking ascent so treacherous that his colleagues consider him a loon.