Did alchemists ever succeed in making gold?

Alchemists never managed to turn lead into gold, because their tools could not do it. Gold is a different element from lead, and changing one element into another is not something chemistry can do. It took the nuclear physics of the twentieth century, with energies far beyond what any alchemist could reach. In 1980 Glenn Seaborg's team at Berkeley made a tiny amount of gold from bismuth, and it came at a net energy loss. CERN has since made gold nuclei out of lead itself, in near-miss collisions of lead nuclei, but only about 90 picograms in all.

The dream itself was real and ancient. Alchemy was practised in China, India, the Muslim world and Europe. Its common aims were turning base metals such as lead into gold, an elixir of immortality and cures for every disease. The dream of gold also attracted con artists, who used sleight of hand and claims of secret knowledge to get money or patronage. From the fourteenth century fake transmutation was outlawed and publicly mocked.

Yet the failure was productive. Trying to produce gold led alchemists to find out systematically what can be done with substances, and that laid the foundation of chemistry. Islamic and European alchemists developed laboratory techniques, theories and terms that are still in use. Paracelsus, who lived from 1493 to 1541, wrote that gold-making was not his aim at all, only the power of medicines. Isaac Newton wrote considerably more about alchemy than about optics or physics.

So the answer has two halves. No alchemist ever made gold by chemistry, and no one could. But their patient trial and error helped build the science that later explained why.