Although this unfortunate behavior has been empirically observed for quite a while (it was one of the reasons why deep neural networks were mostly abandoned for a long time), it is only around 2010 that significant progress was made in understanding it.
A paper titled Understanding the Difficulty of Training Deep Feedforward Neural Networks by Xavier Glorot and Yoshua Bengio found that the problems with the popular logistic sigmoid activation function and the weight initialization technique that was most popular at the time, namely random initialization using a normal distribution with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.
They showed that with this activation function and this initialization scheme, the variance of the outputs of each layer is much greater than the variance of its inputs. Going forward in the network, the variance keeps increasing after each layer until the activation function saturates at the top layers. This is actually made worse by the fact that the logistic function has a mean of 0.5, not 0 (the hyperbolic tangent function has a mean of 0 and behaves slightly better than the logistic function in deep networks).