Cultures throughout the world are associating with the rivers. People depend upon the rivers and their tributaries for food, water, transport, and many other aspects of their daily lives. Unfortunately, human beings have not calculated the accurate lengths for the great rivers even today. The lengths of the rivers are very different in popular textbooks, magazines, atlases and encyclopedias, etc. To accurately determine the lengths of the principal rivers of the world, the combination of satellite image analysis and field investigations to the source regions is proposed in this paper. The lengths of the Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, Yellow, Ob, Yenisey, Amur, Congo and Mekong, with lengths over or close to 5000 km, were calculated using the proposed method. The results may represent the most reliable and accurate lengths of the principal rivers of the world that are currently achievable.